


not this close before

by darkcomedylateshow



Category: Mad Men
Genre: 1970s, Everyone Repeats The Same Mistakes Until They Die, Multi, OT3, Peggy Olson Performs Emotional Labor, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-16
Updated: 2018-01-23
Packaged: 2018-12-31 11:56:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 31,749
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12131973
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darkcomedylateshow/pseuds/darkcomedylateshow
Summary: Stan takes in a guest; Peggy fields a personal crisis; Don and Roger reconnect.





	1. when you get out of the hospital, let me back into your life

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Warnings:** poor communication, casual/risky sex, period homophobia/ableism, discussion of mental illness, drug use; pretty standard Mad Men stuff.  
>  **Notes:** title is from Talking Heads' 'New Feeling'

**october 9th-18th, 1976**

After seven years, two apartments, and rounding the corner on something like stability, Stan had reached the point where he had accepted the fact he would never see Michael Ginsberg again. The letters and phone calls had petered out over time, and eventually Stan had to confront the idea that people come into your life and then sometimes just leave, for good, without a lot of explanation. As normal as the changing of seasons, the transient nature of time, et cetera. He’d have never imagined that he’d be sitting at his desk when this reality he’d built to protect himself would shatter instantaneously. He  _definitely_ never thought Michael would just call him and ask, very plainly, for a ride back to the city.

He did know that his answer would have always been  _of course_. As Stan had scribbled down the address of some hospital two hours upstate, he tried to decide if anything sounded different about Michael. His voice was the same—still reedy, with those honking Brooklyn vowels, always carrying louder than he ever intended. But it wasn’t easy to glean if he’d changed in any way from a few short, apologetic sentences. He’d told him not to worry and that he’d be there as soon as he could.

He never thought he’d take the train down to his apartment and get in his car, parked on the street and reeking of smoke, and less than two hours later be on Route 9 headed to the psychiatric facility Michael had been in for however long. It couldn’t be too long. He’d been in Bellevue for a couple months and then he more or less disappeared.

Stan’s memory of the last time he saw him was strangely vivid, still unable to leave his head. He’d been wearing some hideous yellow shirt, huge and pitted out, with a mismatched tie. Not that he ever paid much attention to how Michael dressed. He remembered only because it was bad, even for him, and he felt some kind of ominous pull in the pit of his stomach the minute he saw him walk into the office. Like something terrible was going to happen, and it just  _had_ to be the last time he’d ever see him. He was half right.

He remembered a lot of that day, but some parts were shaggy. He’d showed up to work stoned after a shouting match with a girlfriend, something about how the super had been pestering her about the phone bill. He was supposed to get his paycheck that afternoon and ended up sitting in the hospital waiting room until nine o’clock that night. Everything else that happened between was only murky, dreamlike.

Stan puts the car in park and steps out, leaning against the door. It’s colder than he expected, and the hospital looks cartoon gloomy, surrounded by streaks of charcoal clouds. He realizes this is the first time he’s even been north of Yonkers.

He checks his watch; it’s twelve-thirty, right on time. He’s tapping a cigarette out of the box when the double doors swing open, and someone says his name:

“Stan, is that you?”

It’s Michael—of course it is, he’d recognize that voice and scrunched-up face anywhere—but he looks different. His hair’s combed, for one thing, clipped neatly behind his ears.

“Ginsberg.” When he comes up to him Stan claps him on the shoulder and shakes him a little. He looks skinnier, maybe, and his shirt is so starched it feels like paper.

“I don’t know why I asked,” he says. “You look the same.”  

“It’s good to see you.” Stan thinks over those four words, a knee-jerk adage that doesn’t come out as sincere as he hoped. “Ready to go?”

“Yeah,” Ginsberg says, opening the rear door and throwing his suitcase on the seat. “Been ready. This whole place gives me the creeps."

There’s some joke rattling in the back of his head about an ivory tower, but Stan decides it’s inappropriate. He catches Michael staring at the ground for a second, noticing the dead leaves slicked down to the asphalt.

“C'mon,” he says, opening the door. “Traffic’s gonna be a bitch.”

“Are you still living in that shithole in the East Village?”

“No,” Stan laughs, “haven’t been there in years. Anyway, Peg and I bought our own shithole. On the west side.”

“You married Peggy?”

“We’re not married,” Stan says. “Just living together.”

“How long has, uh…” Michael clears his throat, showing an unusual amount of tact. “How long has that been going on?”

“Coming up on six years.” Stan pauses, then adds: "On and off.”

“Jesus,” he blurts. “And Peggy is—fine, with me staying?"

“Of course, man, of course she’s fine with it,” Stan says, maybe a little too fast. “She’ll be happy to see you. Anyway, enough about me and her—I want to hear about you, yeah?"

* * *

“Why don’t you just put him in a cab or something?”

“What am I supposed to do, carry him? He’s been out cold since this morning.”

Peggy is sitting on the edge of her hotel bed in London with the phone in her lap, balancing a drink and a cigarette in her free hand. “Who even gave you his address? He hasn’t been in New York for ages.”

She hears him cover the receiver and groan. “He must have gotten it from my assistant.”

“Melanie? Why did you even hire her? She’s as dumb as a post.” She’s about to reach over to ash her cigarette when someone knocks at the door. “Hold on. Sorry.”

She rests the phone on the bed and answers the door. Someone from the concierge desk is standing there—she remembers her from the desk, fresh-faced with a long ponytail.  

“Miss Olson? I have someone named Stan Rit-zo trying to reach you.”

“Tell him to call back in just a minute,” she says, distracted, “tell him I’m on the phone with—“

“He just left a message—he said he was on the road, calling from some motel.”

Peggy knits her brow. What could be so important that he had to make an international call from a hotel. And— “wait, on the road  _where_?”

The girl hands her a slip of hotel stationary with a message, printed neatly in capital letters: _GINSBERG CALLED. PICKING HIM UP FROM THE PSYCH WARD & LETTING HIM SLEEP ON COUCH. SORRY. _

“Thank you,” Peggy says, forcing her face into a polite smile before she shuts the door. She stabs the cigarette out in an empty ashtray and picks up the phone. “Don, are you still there? Just—keep telling me what happened.”

“He came into the apartment at six this morning, three sheets to the wind, carrying a trunk. He was slurring, but I managed to make out that Marie wanted a divorce. I guess he’d gotten on the first plane here.”  

“They divorced already?”

“Apparently.”

“Listen to this,” Peggy says. “I just found out Stan is picking up Michael Ginsberg. From the mental hospital. He’s going to stay at our house.”

“Jesus,” he says. “How long has he been in there?”

“I think he’s been in and out of a couple different places,” she says, “maybe. I don’t think he’s doing much better.”

“That’s too bad.” She hears a lighter clicking in the background, a ragged inhale. “You can’t help people like that. You can encourage them, but—they have to do the work themselves.”

“I don’t want anything to  _do_  with him,” Peggy admits. “But Stan will want to kill me if I don’t at least let him stay on the couch. Like we  _owe_  it to him or something.”

“Let’s just say I know what it’s like,” Don says, “to have an intruder in your own home.”

“Okay,” Peggy says, letting him believe he’s being helpful. “I have to go. I have an early flight tomorrow.”  

“Can you call me when you get back?”

“Sure. It might be a little crazy, but—I’ll try.”

“Congratulations on Beefeater Gin, by the way. Freddy had very nice things to say, last time I saw him.”

“So you’ve been talking to Freddy.” She’s known both of them long enough to know what  _that_  means.

“I’ve been trying," he says. "Goodbye, Peggy.”

Peggy puts the phone down for a second, then calls the hotel desk. She asks them to call the apartment in a few hours with a message:  _Michael can stay the night. But I want him gone by the next morning._

Then she asks them to wake her up at five o’clock for her flight out of Heathrow, turns off the light, and climbs into bed face down, her mouth tasting of gin. 

* * *

They hit traffic getting back into the city, so Stan stops at some greasy spoon on the wrong side of the Lincoln Tunnel and buys the both of them dinner. Michael sits across from him, talking while staring a hole into the pitcher of beer.

“Every time they admit me again, I meet someone that just  _proves_  to me I shouldn’t be there,” he says, tearing at his napkin. “There was this girl I met who was a—they don’t call them nymphomaniacs, they call them sex addicts. So she was addicted to sex. And we got to talking, and she started telling me how she’d been with so many men they eventually started to blur into one another. And how it was never about getting her rocks off, but just the, like—sense of validation. Just having someone pay attention to her body. Can you imagine?”

“Michael,” Stan asks, “are  _you_ okay?”

“What? I’m fine. I mean, I haven’t had sex in four years, it wasn’t going to happen then. But I didn’t feel slighted by the girl, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“I mean, what have you even been doing since you left? What  _are_  you doing between hospital stays?”

Michael folds the shreds of his napkin and pushes them into the corner. “I lived with my father, the first few times. Then they started setting me up in halfway houses with these dead end jobs, dishwashing or janitor work. And I couldn’t do it. I  _tried_.”

"You never thought to call me? Ask for a project, or something?”

Michael avoids looking at him, refilling his half-empty glass of beer. He doesn’t seem to be relishing it. “Come on. I couldn’t face Peggy again."

“Ginzo. She’s fine. Honestly—“

“I couldn’t. And anyway,  _you_  were my last-ditch call. And only because I thought you’d have moved onto something else by now.”

“I’m glad you did.” Stan’s taken aback, but it’s funny, in a way, that he’d think that. “You know you can always ask us for help. Any time.”

“ _Us_ ,” he repeats, almost laughing. “I still can’t believe you two shacked up.”

“Barely.”

“You  _live_ together.”

“Yeah, but—“ Stan scratches at his beard, trying to think of a verbal justification. “She’s her own person. I mean, Christ, she’s in London right now finishing some pitch for a gin company.”

“So she’s still married to the job,” Michael says. “You’re pretty much her mistress.”

Stan laughs, even though he shouldn’t. “Pretty much. But she’s also my best friend. To the point where we know so much about each other that we can’t  _stand_  each other. And yet even in those moments we’re together, I can tell that—“

“You’re in love with her.”

“Well. Yes.” Stan pulls his glass of beer in closer. “But what I was going to say was, sometimes I can tell she wants to kill me.”

He feels guilty saying it, but Michael just laughs. “You’re clearly doing s _omething_ right.”

Then the waitress brings them their food and they go quiet, both exhausted of useful things to say.

When he and Michael make it to the apartment, his downstairs neighbor is smoking a cigarette on the stoop. She tells Stan his phone was ringing off the hook a few hours ago.

“It was probably Peggy at the hotel,” he tells Michael on the way up the stairs. “But it’s late there now. You want to watch TV?”

“Sure,” he says, although he sounds distracted. Stan unlocks the door and flips on the lights.

“Pretty nice place.” Ginsberg opens the window just as a din of horns and police sirens start up a block away. It’s October but the air is still swampy, the humidity weighing under the initial chill.

“I was partial to staying on the East Side. Or even, you know, not living in a shit part of town. But—Peg wanted to keep being a landlady. And maybe wanted to be more trains away from her mother.”

He’s careful how he talks about her, even now. She had confessed before that she sometimes hated the way the two of them would gang up on her, back when he was a pig and didn’t know any better. But it throws him off, as unsurprising as it really is, that Michael seems both different and the same. There’s no way he’d tease her now, since he’s vying for a roof under his head and not a paycheck.

He switches on the tube and lights up a joint from the end table. Michael opens up his suitcase, and he hears the familiar rattle of pill bottles at the bottom. He wonders what they have him on. He wonders if it’s rude to ask, and decides  _probably_.

“How many changes of clothes you got in there?” Stan asks, peering at the bag. It doesn’t have room for much.

“I dunno, two shirts and a pair of pants?”

“Jesus, man. Do you have anything to sleep in, at least?”

“God,” Michael says, flopping back on the couch, “you don’t just sleep in your clothes? When did you become a grown-up?”

“I’m thirty-eight with a mortgage. I had to do it sometime.” He grimaces at him, puffing on the joint, avoiding hot ash inches from his face. “I’m getting you a clean shirt.”

“Give me some of that,” Ginsberg says, gesturing to him. Stan holds it out to him, but pauses first.  

“It won’t mess up your medication, right?”

“Nah, I don’t think so,” he says. “I want to know how it makes me feel.”

“Suit yourself,” he says, going to the bedroom. A few seconds later he hears him coughing up a storm.

“What do you know about anybody’s medication?” Michael asks, once he catches his breath and Stan comes back into the room.

“My mother was on all kinds of pills.” He tosses a T-shirt in Michael's general direction and sits next to him, watching him unbutton his shirt. “ _Everybody_ ’s mother was. The psychiatrists in Dover hand out Valiums like they’re goddamn Chiclets.”

“Where’s Dover again?”

“Massachusetts,” Stan says. “We seriously never had this conversation?”

“I guess not.” Michael takes a more cautious inhale and hands it back to Stan. “Like  _Dover Boys_?”

“Sure.” Stan grins at him, stoned and benign, the same way he always did whenever he didn’t know what he was talking about. He grinds the end of the half-finished joint into the ashtray until the cherry goes flat. Then he starts to listen to the news, not really paying attention.

Michael seems less comfortable with the silence. He waits a second and says: "Listen, this is extremely temporary. I just need a few days to get back on my feet, and—“

“Absolutely. Whatever you need,” Stan says. He's just surprised he’s looking him in the eye.

“Okay,” he says, and tosses the mental-patient shirt over the ottoman. Stan looks away when he pulls the undershirt over his head, but he catches a glimpse. Was he always bony like that?

He gets up finds him a clean sheet and a blanket from the linen closet, stuffs a pillow into a cleanish-looking case, an awful avocado green. Then he picks the roach out of the ashtray again and sits down in the chair next to him.

His memory fails him after that. Later he wonders why he didn’t try harder to listen. It was fascinating when it happened to strangers, but with Michael he just found himself wondering what he could have done differently, way back then. He could have done  _something_ , he was sure. Maybe he couldn’t have kept him out of an institution, but he could have at least done something to convince him to call sooner.

 _Of course you can find a way to make it about yourself,_ Stan thought. Then—maybe from the driving, or the emotional strain, or the combination thereof—he found himself resting his head on the back of the ratty reclining chair. He begins to rest his eyes for seconds at a time, then longer and longer until he feels his neck loll sideways and sleep covers him like a thick, musty blanket.

He wakes up to the sound of someone switching off the TV, quietly playing cartoons. When he opens his eyes, Peggy is standing over him. The clock blinks in the corner of his eye—it’s 11:42. He sees Michael, still out cold, one arm hanging off the sofa.

She mouths at him, silently: “Jesus fucking  _Christ_ , Stan.”

* * *

Michael is awake, but stays still until he’s sure the living room is empty. He hears the sound of someone shushing and then two pairs of shoes going down the hall. Loud whispers. Then regular voices behind closed doors. He listens carefully:

“…you  _seriously_  didn’t call the hotel when you got home?”

“It was one o’clock in the morning there. You said you needed to—”

“But you  _knew_ I would have a problem with him.”

“I—knew you would have a problem with it, but I just thought we could talk about it once you at least  _saw_  him. He's so different—“

“You still ignored me.”

Michael sits up and picks a half-smoked cigarette out of the ashtray, rubbing his eyes with the corner of his sleeve. Maybe if she sees him awake and on his way out, she’ll take some amount of pity. But he’s confident he won’t be invited back tonight.

The door opens and the two of them come down the hall. When Peggy sees him, sitting up and conscious, she stops dead in her tracks.

“I’m so sorry” is the first thing out of his mouth. Then he reaches for his shirt and stuffs it in his bag, trying to remove any visual evidence he was there, taking up her space.  

“Ginsberg, don’t,” Stan says.

“It’s fine. Really. I was just leaving—I’ll be out of your hair in just a—"

“No it’s  _fine_ ,” Peggy says, as abrupt and transparent as always. “I’m going to work, anyway.”

Stan furrows his brow. “It’s Sunday. You just got back.”

“Yes, but I have some things to finish. I won’t be too late.”

“Alright.” He looks at her, smiling uneasily. “I’ll make you an early dinner. Then you can get some sleep.”

“Yeah,” Peggy says, slipping her purse over her shoulder and unlocking the door. “Bye.”

Then she’s gone. Michael waits a second, glancing down and remembering he’s still wearing Stan’s shirt. Then he says: “Don’t worry, I’ll get a motel. I know how to read a room.”

“Come on, I’m not going to do that to you. Just ignore her. She’ll get past it.”

 _Whatever that means_ , Michael thinks. He puts the suitcase down—it’s only got clothes in it, anyway.

“You want breakfast?”

“No thanks,” he says. “I’m going for a walk.”

“Alright.” Stan reaches into his back pocket and opens up his billfold, handing him ten dollars. “Take it. For cab fare. Or whatever you need.”

Michael thanks him quietly and leaves the apartment. He starts walking and decides to not stop—he walks up almost forty blocks until he hits a movie theater near Time/Life, one he used to blow off work in all the time. He buys five tickets back-to-back, enough to hold him over for the entire day, and settles in.

* * *

When Peggy gets to the office, she closes the blinds and curls up on the couch, pulling her coat over herself as a makeshift blanket. She falls asleep, hard and fast, and when she comes to, a secretary—not her own—is knocking at her door.

“Miss Olson, someone’s here to see you?”

“Who is it?”

“Don Draper,” she says, just as he hears him shouting _It’s me_.

She checks her watch—it’s almost five o’clock—and groans under her breath. “Yes, send him in.”

Don arrives looking, frankly, like shit. Something’s always  _off_ to her about seeing him in jeans and no tie (even though he hasn’t worn a suit in years), but on top of that she can tell he hasn’t slept, or shaved.

“Did you sleep here?” he asks, nursing a Coke from the vending machine.  

“Not all day.” That’s a half-truth. Peggy sits up and smooths her blouse, reaching for the unwrapped pack of cigarettes on the table. She rips off the cellophane and offers him the box; he takes one without a word.

“Is Ginsberg still there?” he asks, once he lights her cigarette.

“As far as I know.” Peggy holds in the smoke for a second and exhales through her nose. “What about Roger?”

“He was gone when I woke up,” he says, sitting down. “I called Mona and asked. I called the Waldorf and the Roosevelt Hotel—they said there wasn’t anyone staying there under his name.”

“Could he be using a fake name?” she asks.

“Why would he do that?”

“I don’t know,” she says, realizing how ridiculous it sounds out loud. “Have you tried Joan?”

“She said she hadn’t heard from him over a year.”

“Christ, it really must be bad, then. When was the last time  _you_  heard from him?”

“When he sent me a letter from Paris,” he says, “apologizing for falling in love with Marie.”

“That’s so dramatic,” she blurts, reaching over to ash her cigarette. “Holy fuck. I _forgot_  he married off with Megan’s—”

 _Ugh_. She pauses, but realizes that makes it even worse. “Um, with Megan’s mom. Sorry.”

Don shakes his head, clearly uncomfortable but willing to laugh it off. “And then invited me to come take LSD with them—to have a ‘reunifying experience.’ And  _then_ he never wrote again and got divorced six years later.”

“Six years is pretty good, for him.”

“Anyway, it’s a shame about Michael.” Don starts to make a dent with his thumb in his can of soda. “He had a lot of potential as a copywriter.”

“You almost  _never_  took any of his ideas,” Peggy says. “I remember him always complaining that you didn’t recognize his talent. Or were ignoring it.”

“Maybe I was, at the time.” It’s the kind of non-statement that makes Peggy want to roll her eyes, but she restrains herself. “ _I_ remember him accosting me in the elevator for not using his copy once. It was something for Pepsi—Snow Cone or something—“

“Sno Ball,” she corrects. “I remember it, too.”

“It was different back then,” he says. “It’s different when you’re on top of the world. It’s so much easier to ignore the people at the bottom.”

“I think I know what you mean.”

The phone starts to ring, so Peggy answers it. Stan is on the other line: “How’s it going?”

“Good,” she chirps, disarmed and still disoriented. “I’m fine.”

“Just wanted to make sure you weren’t asleep. Don called the house, by the way. I told him where you were.”

“Yes, I know,” she says. “He’s here now, actually.”

“Will you be back for dinner? Do you want to invite him?”

Don, listening in, raises his hand in polite refusal. She’s relieved; three is already enough of a crowd. “He says no, thank you. I’ll leave in ten minutes, okay?”

“Okay.” He pauses. "Love you.”

“Love you too,” she says, and hangs up.

“How’s Stan?” Don asks.

“The same.”

* * *

 

Don catches a cab from McCann to his studio, but the traffic starts to crawl the further he gets downtown, so he pays and and walks the rest of the way. It’s a brisk night—he can’t get away with only going out in shirtsleeves much longer. His thoughts are heavy and scattered, and he tries to fixate on how good a smoke will feel once he’s inside, how it’ll cool him down and sharpen his mind to a point.

Someone is standing on the sidewalk outside his building, with a cigarette and well-tailored coat, sticking out like a sore thumb. But even uptown he could probably tell who it was from a block away.

"You're back,” Don says.

Roger grins. “You wouldn’t be caught dead in this neighborhood ten years ago."

“Neither would you.” Don feels for his key in his pocket, but Roger stops him before he even gets his hands around it.

“Let me buy you dinner, or something,” he says, stepping in front of him. "To make up for that sorry mess last night. We'll have a proper reunion.”

Don wants to hesitate, to not give him the satisfaction. But Roger always had a way about him that made it impossible to say no.

“Sure,” he says. “You pick the place.”

“ _You_ pick. You know I’m hopeless below 23rd Street.”

He should have known better. Don remembers a restaurant close by and starts heading towards a side street, waiting for him to catch up.

“I really am sorry,” Roger says, once they fall into stride. "You know what they say. Out of all the couches in all the dead-end apartments in this town, I ended up on yours.”

"It's not the worst one to end up on."

"You're right, it could have been much worse. I could have gone to  _Jane_ ’s.”

“Christ,” Don laughs. “I haven’t heard Jane Siegel’s name in a while.”

“Jane  _Schulman_. She got remarried to some professor. I looked him up—he teaches Philosophy 401 at Co _lum_ bia. Can you imagine?”

When Peggy gets back to the apartment, the first two things she notices are the smell of food cooking and the fact that Michael is gone. Stan sticks his head out at the sound of the door and looks practically disappointed it’s her.

“Where were you?”

“I was at the office,” she says, throwing her purse on the chair, slipping off her coat. “Why?”

“You said you’d be back early,” he says, turning away from the stove. He’s tense, bordering on accusatory. “It’s almost seven o’clock.”

“Jesus Christ, Stan,” she snaps, “you’re treating me like I’m a cheating husband or something, when all I did was go to take a nap and try to get some  _work_ done—”

“So you  _did_ leave to avoid Ginsberg,” he says, like it’s the ultimate  _gotcha_ or something.

“Yes, I did! I told you don’t want to see him.” She pushes her hand back through her hair, trying to contain herself. Then she stops and notices that the room is conspicuously empty. Just the two of them.

“I don’t know,” Stan says. "He hasn’t been back since this morning. And I’m starting to get really fucking worried.”

A grave expression crosses her face. She reaches for a cigarette but stops herself, crossing over to the couch to sit down.

“Where could he have gone?” she asks.

“I don’t know.”

“Did you try looking up his father?”

“I called him. He said he hadn’t heard anything.”

“Jesus,” she murmurs. Then: “I’m sorry I yelled at you.”

“That wasn’t yelling.” He sits next to her, rubbing at his temples. “ _I’m_ sorry. I just don’t know what to do.”

“Nothing, I guess. I think we should just wait.” So they do.

* * *

 

The theater isn’t how he remembered it. It’s run down and every showing is half-empty, even for the new ones. But the movies are good, better than any of the crap he saw to pass the time at SCP—those were always saccharine and forgettable, with paper-thin dialogue and plots that seemed to just reflect the vanity of the author (and the stars.) These are somehow different, less . They still feel manufactured, as seductive as any ad for whiskey, but there’s an effortlessness—almost rawness—to them he’s unfamiliar with.

The formula starts to feel worn-in after a while. He stops paying attention after  _Taxi Driver_ and starts watching the people instead. There’s no one around in the theater—he passed a newer, nicer-looking place on Second Avenue—except for teenage couples fooling around and bored, stoned-looking young men like himself. He observes the shapes of moving bodies in . When people notice, or turn around at the feeling of eyes on them, Michael glances away just in time.

When he steps out onto the sidewalk, his mind feels appropriately numb. So much so that he doesn’t really care if he can’t stay the night inside or not. He’ll sleep in a goddamn doorway if it comes to that. He spends the rest of his money on a cab home—he doesn’t remember the address, so the driver just drops him off around Seventh and 24th Street, and he works his way down from there.  

Even early on a Sunday night, it’s lively. He passes all kinds of bars blasting music, avoiding panhandlers on the corners, catching snippets of baseball games coming from people’s car radios.

Waiting at a walk sign, Michael sees two men sitting at a sidewalk cafe, splitting a carafe of something light pink and perspiring on the glass. He realizes he’d kill for something to drink. They catch him staring.

“Hey,” one of them says, all angled cheekbones and yellow curls, “you want to sit down with us, have a drink?”

“Oh, uh, no. No thank you. I’m not queer.”

He feels terrible once he says it out loud, but the men both just laugh. “Alright, honey.”

Michael weaves through the different side streets, trying to remember what the outside of the brownstone even looked like. Just as he’s about to give up, he spots the same hippie girl from the night before sitting on the steps. She doesn’t notice him at first—she’s listening to a portable radio and petting an orange cat with half a tail.

“Nice night out, huh?” she asks.

“Yeah, it’s pretty nice,” he says. “Hey, do you mind letting me in? I’m staying with Stan and Peggy, but I don’t have a key.”

“Yeah, I remember you,” the girl says. “Door’s unlocked.”

When he opens the door, he can hear people talking, but it goes silent when he starts walking up the stairs. Then when he stops outside the door, he hears Peggy’s voice on the other side of the wall: “Do you think it’s him?”

Their door is unlocked, too, which seems dangerous. When Michael steps inside he sees the two of them sitting on the couch. They look like they’ve just been having a serious conversation, both holding beers but not drinking them. Then they both whip around and stare at him, somewhere between horrified and relieved.

“You scared the shit out of us,” Stan says. He gets up and walks across the room, and just as Michael starts to flinch he pulls him into a hug.

It takes him a second to relax into it, to remember what contact feels like again. He sees Peggy, standing away from them and staring, holding the bottle of beer by the neck. Then he remembers to breathe.

“Is—something burning?” he asks.

“Fuck.” Stan lets go of him and dashes to the stove, switching off the gas. He grabs the handle of the pot with a towel and gingerly drops it in the sink. Peggy goes and opens the kitchen window to get the smoke out.

“God, I’m sorry,” Michael says, his hand on the back of a dining room chair. “I didn’t mean to spoil your dinner.”

“ _You_ spoiled it? You were just late.” Stan turns to him with a still-bewildered grin, still scraping the burnt remains—ragu, maybe?—into the trash. “I’m the one who looked away from the fuckin’ stove.”

Peggy folds her arms. “I’m the one who distracted you. By being an asshole.”

There’s a pause, before Stan tosses the pot into the sink and switches the water on, steam rising up from the metal rim. “So really we’re all to blame.”

“Let’s get a pizza, or something,” she says. Then she looks at Michael, surprisingly warm. “You want to come?”

“Sure,” he says. “I’d like that.”

* * *

“One thing, about last night,” Don says to Roger, as they walk back to his apartment. “What were you saying in French?”

“I  _do_ speak French now. You may have to be more specific.”

“No, you kept saying it over and over. Something about pronunciation? You were very—”

“ _Ta prononciation,_ ” Roger says, sounding the words out with a selfsure clunkiness, “ _c'est tellement horrible que tu as l'air d'être un_  mongoloid _._ Something Marie said to me when I was leaving the apartment. Need a translation?”

“No,” Don laughs, “I think I got it.”

“Everything else that happened, I deserved. But I  _didn’t_ deserve to be burned at the stake for trying—and failing—to learn such an ugly goddamn language.”

(Don remembers an impromptu French lesson with Megan years ago, where his struggle to approximate the guttural  _R_ in  _sucre_ led to her teasing that she sounded like a farm boy. He also remembers eavesdropping on phone conversations with her mother and sisters and trying, desperately, to find any words that looked remotely like what she’d said. First it was to learn more about her; later it became more about seeing if she was talking about him.)

“Man,” Roger says, once they turn onto Thompson Street, “you know I said I’d always follow your vision, but now I have to ask—where the hell have you taken me?”

“The future,” Don says. “Or at least something like it.”

They’re standing in front of the first floor of his apartment, a three-story warehouse with most of the windows taped up with newspaper. He unlocks the double doors and pulls one open, gesturing to Roger:  _after you_.

“And you’re sure the future doesn’t involve bludgeoning me to death?” he ribs, wandering into the dark, empty room. Don flips a switch and the dingy florescent lights go up on. It’s a big space, with concrete floors and sound that carries. There’s nothing except for a few desks and drafting tables and a bunch of lamps, their black cords coiled on the floor.   

“This is the space.”

“You bought this whole building?”

Don nods. “It was a textile factory, before this.”

“Christ. This place is huge.”

“Upstairs could be converted to more office space. I’m the only one staying in the apartments, anyway. And we’ll start interviewing soon for sales, secretaries, that kind of thing. Writers.”

Roger turns around, hands in his pockets. “So you’re going back. You really want to lead that life again?”  

“Sure I do.” He looks at him incredulously, as if he’d never considered anything else. “And it’s barely  _that_ life.”

Roger's face is colorless. “I distinctly remember you not being able to get through a single pitch in the last ten years that didn’t involve a fifth of something or skipping town.”

Don doesn’t react, but he feels his neck tense, just a little. “Roger.”

“You know it’s true. And what’s so wrong with what you have now? I mean—you’re rich, you’re spiritual, you’ve been good and gotten on the wagon.” When he doesn’t reply, Roger just blinks.. “You’re so obvious. You think I won’t want to spend any time with you anymore if it doesn’t involve drinking, but Don—you’re my best friend. My  _only_ friend. It’s not the one beer talking; I really believe that.”  

He’s still quiet.

“Drop acid with me,” Roger says, with a completely straight face. “I promise it’ll do a world of good for you. Before I tried it, I was—a lost person. I see that in you now. I’ve always seen it.”

Part of him must know how hoary and deluded the sentiment is. But he remembers how he and Roger always end up in the same place. Always the last seat at the table. Then Don realizes, or perhaps just remembers, what about this feels so out of place.

“I said yes the first time. But you never wrote back.”

“Well.” He clears his throat. “Marie objected, for obvious reasons.”  

“Right.”

“Nothing stopping us now, I suppose.” Roger turns and opens the door, stepping out onto the busy sidewalk. Don follows. There’s loud music coming from somebody’s window, someone coming down the street with a portable radio. “But I must bid you  _adieu_ for tonight. Since I assume you don't have much in the way of a nightcap.”

He steps out to the curb, waving down a cab. Don waits for him to get in, then goes back into the makeshift office, surveying the clean floors, the empty desks and empty tables. Then the moths start to wake up and circle the lights, so he switches them off.

* * *

“Nah, I didn’t like that one. I’m sick of all the demon movies—the last good one I saw was maybe  _The Exorcist_.”

“I couldn’t see that one,” Stan says, grimacing. “The book scared the hell out of me.”

“Stan’s scared of thirteen-year-old girls,” Peggy says. “And Catholicism.”

They’ve just come back from dinner, which Stan was adamant on paying for—even refusing Michael’s spare change for the tip, leaving it to rattle in his pocket all the way home. He and Peggy had put on such an insistent, almost aggressive show of hospitality that he had no choice but to just look down and say  _thank you_.

The two of them are starting to banter more than usual, too, asking him questions, talking to fill the air—something Michael originally feared was some kind of playacting, a way to mask the awkwardness. Now he wonders if they’re always like this. No wonder they seem so exhausted with each other.

He’s still wearing the wool cardigan Stan lent him. (They were halfway out the door when he had asked if he had anything for the cold—leaving Michael and Peggy to stand there, hapless, at the landing while he ran upstairs and grabbed it off the hook _._ ) He ends up needing it—the walk home is cold, and it’s colder still when they get back to the apartment—Peggy goes to close the window and cranks up the radiator, which sputters loudly over the record Stan’s put on.

“What the hell is this?” Michael asks, looking at the back of the sleeve.

“It’s Clapton.”

“ _This_ is Clapton?”

“Why, what’s wrong with it?”

“It’s dogshit.”

“ _What?_ Come on. ‘Bell Bottom Blues’ is amazing. And ‘Layla’s a great song too.”

(“‘Layla’ sucks,” Peggy mutters from the kitchen, pouring herself a drink.)

Stan rolls his eyes. “What’s wrong with it?”

“It’s too—gooey. It’s overtly sentimental. I don’t know.”

“Fine.” Stan lifts up the needle and puts in the holster, then kneels to look around on the shelf for something else. “You’ve become quite the music critic.”

“I’m not critiquing it,” Michael says, squinting at some of the lyrics. “Some people like sentimentality. I just—I can’t think of anything I’ve heard on the radio in the last ten years that hasn’t been  _plagued_ with it. And then it starts to replace meaning.”

“I think I get what you mean.” Peggy sits down on the ottoman. “I haven’t heard anything new I really liked in a while.”  

“Zeppelin?” Stan suggests. She just wrinkles her nose.

“Yeah, I don’t like that stuff either,” Michael says, relieved he’s in agreement with someone. “It’s all piddly—like it’s dipped in LSD or something. And the last Stones album was crap. I mean, Led Zeppelin can’t really be the logical conclusion of rock and roll, right?”

“Come on. Of course it’s not.” Stan scoffs in cagey denial, still thumbing through the record collection. Finally he finds the right one and pulls it from the shelf, putting the record on and handing Michael the sleeve.

“Who’re the Modern Lovers?” he asks, flipping it over to read the back.

“Some group from Massachusetts. Some of the kids in the office were playing it a few weeks ago, so I went and bought my own copy—Peg, you remember I played it for you? You agreed it was good, right?”

“Yeah, they’re good,” Peggy says, sounding mostly noncommittal. She sits at the opposite end of the couch from Michael, ice clinking in her glass.

“Everything’s going to sound like this soon.” Stan lets the needle drop and it revolves for a few seconds, before a voice counts the band off and the guitars and keyboard come crashing down. It’s loud and jumpy and not quite like anything he’s heard before.

“I like the noisiness of it,” Michael says after a second, and to his chagrin no one really says anything or gives any indication they agree. He starts to swirl the ice cubes in his glass until Peggy acquiesces:

“I don’t know. I think I might finally be too old to understand what young people like.”

(“They have new people for that now,” Stan teases.)

Michael just shakes his head, still listening. Then he shrugs. “I know it’s not for me. But it’s a relief to know that I  _get_ it. Kind of.”

“Kind of,” Stan echoes.

They listen through the first side, eventually turning down the speakers and leaning back in their seats to talk, swapping stories, some approximation of catching up on seven years in near anonymity. Peggy is much more relaxed than she was before, Michael’s noticed, but there’s an air of distant geniality, like they’re strangers who’ve just met over dinner. Even when they get to the end of the first side, and a comfortable silence starts to set in, she excuses herself for bed, blaming the long day they’d had, and the next long day to come.

“Every day feels long,” Michael says, not really knowing what he meant. Then they both wish her good night.

When the door clicks shut down the hall, Stan reaches out and flips the record over, then offers an inhale on the joint in his hand, holding it out to Michael by the filtered end. He declines, politely, and starts to chew the ice cubes in his empty glass.

“Hey,” Stan says after a while, his voice heavy and stoned. “Your hair looks normal again.”

Michael squints at him. “What?”

“Your hair. When I picked you up it was all neat.”

“Oh.” His hand flies up to his head automatically. “Yeah, I guess it was. They made us comb our hair, shave, iron our own shirts, shit like that. All under supervision, of course. I didn’t bring the comb with me. They didn’t even let me take the safety razor.”

“It looks better like this,” Stan says. Then he reaches for his head and tousles it, which only makes Michael crack up and squirm and try to get away from him.

He’s laughing, but he’s acutely aware of Stan’s fingers in his hair. The fact his hand stays there for just a second longer than it ought to. He’s insane. He’s going totally insane—then it’s over, Stan’s getting up and stretching with a yawn, hands on his knees.

“Okay. Well. Good night, man.” He pats him on the shoulder and disappears down the hall. Michael sits there for a moment, left alone with the empty hum of the speakers, which he reaches over and switches off. Then he changes into a T-shirt and lies down on the couch, pulling the blankets over himself.

He lies there for what feels like hours, even though he knows that he loses track of time easily in the dark. When he finally does get to sleep, it’s dreamless and musty.

* * *

When Peggy gets back from work at the end of a predictably arduous week, Stan is nowhere to be found. Instead she walks in on an image she finds incredibly strange, almost ripped out of a dream she's had before: Michael sitting on the couch, holding a needle and thread and one of her blouses across his lap.

"Sorry," he blurts, paralyzed. "I just—saw it on your ironing board and thought I'd make myself useful.”

“You really didn’t have to.” It takes her a second to entirely process what’s in front of her. He finishes sewing the button on and hands it to her. Struck with nothing else to say, she asks: “Where’d you learn to do that?”

“I did all kinds of stuff for my father on the Sabbath,” he says, reaching for a newspaper. “I did all kinds of stuff for him in general, actually. I mean, who else was going to?”

Then they both hear Stan coming up the stairs. When he gets inside, he greets the two of them, kisses Peggy’s cheek briskly, and asks: “Are we still going to that thing tonight?”

“Oh.” She looks between the two of them and shrugs. “Maybe. Michael, do you remember Joyce Ramsay?”

“The lesbian?”

He looks like he feels bad after saying it, so she doesn’t comment. “She’s a photographer for  _Vanity Fair_ now. So supposedly she has all kinds of interesting friends we’ve never met.”

“Anybody famous?” Michael asks.

Stan smiles, detangling his arm from around Peggy’s waist and sitting down. “Probably not. And if they are, it’s nobody we know. Do you want to come with us?”

“I don’t know.” Michael looks between the two of them sheepishly. “Are you sure this is really, uh, my type of scene?”

“It's not ours, either.” Stan reaches out and shakes his shoulder, the same way he's been doing more and more as long as Michael is taking up space here. His hand is weirdly warm. “That's why we need you. C'mon.”

And Michael finds he can never say no to that. It's his kryptonite. Stan must know that by now.

* * *

But, of course, in Joyce’s massive loft apartment, packed almost wall to wall with people, Michael wanders off and inadvertently gets separated from the two of them. He’s left standing in a corner, drink in hand, swaying vaguely to the thrum of the speakers. He keeps feeling the same pair of eyes on him, but he’s afraid to look. What if it’s someone he knows? It seems unlikely, seeing how he doesn’t see a familiar face in here. Except—

“Hey Joyce,” he says, having to shout a little over the noise.

“Hey, Michael,” she says, looking him over with what he thinks might be a concerned expression. If he’s not in the middle of a paranoid delusion, he thinks, half-joking. “Everything going alright?”

“Yeah, it’s a great party. I just have to—um—that guy over there with the jacket has been looking at me for ten minutes or so, maybe, and I just want to make sure I’m not having a stroke or that he’s not a serial killer or something, you know?”

“Oh, what?” she says, glancing over to the aforementioned guy—tall and bony, with wild hair—and back to him. “No, that’s Duke—you should go talk to him. He’s very sweet.”

He’s about to politely decline when  _Duke_ (that can’t be his real name) sees the two of them looking and waves, walking over with an empty glass in his hand. Fuck. He’s got a broad smile and hugs Joyce when he gets near her, saying something in her ear. Then they both turn to look at him.

“This is Michael,” Joyce says, throwing her arm over his shoulder and reeling him in closer—and Michael stays, despite the leadlike feeling rising up in his throat. “He’s Peggy’s friend.”

“Peggy has cool friends?” Duke ribs.

“It’s a work in progress,” she laughs. “I was the first.”

Then he turns to Michael. “Can I get you a beer or anything?”

He’s about to say yes, but Joyce cuts in— “The caterers only have watered down crap. Come with me and I’ll make you a proper drink.”

They lumber up the narrow flight of stairs into the tiny kitchen, where she procures three glasses and a bottle of tequila. Michael feels guilty, briefly, for losing Stan and Peggy, but in his somewhat boozy/stoned state he doesn’t linger on it for long. He’s standing in a kitchen with dirty white tiles and all-white countertops, immaculately clean with the exception of a few squeezed-out limes and tequila stains.

“What do you do for work?” Duke asks him—he sounds genuinely interested.

“He works with Peggy.”

“Oh!”

“I used to,” Michael corrects, shuffling a bit. “I’ve been on sabbatical.”

“Why’s that?”

“I thought I was—compromising my ethics, sometimes. Because there’s advertising and then there’s manipulation.”

“Yeah?” Duke says.

“It’s everywhere, when you think about it. For instance, like—how perfume ads are just selling sex. Because who do you buy it for? Your wife, or girlfriend, so she smells a certain way that you find sexy. Or the girl buys it so she smells good for her man.” He glances at Joyce. “Or whoever. But it’s all about constructing a fantasy, trying to appeal to one or two kinds of people.”  

“How can a perfume be sexy?” Joyce asks, handing him a margarita in a cloudy-looking highball.

“Of course a smell is sexy,” Michael says. “It has to appeal to your, what’s it, um, ola—ol _factory_  glands.”

“I’ve met people who smell sexy,” Duke says.

Joyce wrinkles her nose. “I guess.”

Then Duke turns to him, quickly pivoting to a new topic—“I’m going to a show after this.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“It’s this group I’ve never seen before. They’re supposed to be pretty good. Do you want to come?”

“Peg and Stan wanted to see this, too,” Joyce says. Michael is pretty sure that’s not true, but he’s thankful she’s keeping them involved, not sending him off to a second location, alone with a very compelling stranger. “Maybe you two can tow them along.”

* * *

 

So they do. Both Stan and Peggy are buzzed and amiable enough to go pretty much anywhere, although their original discussion had involved pancakes. Instead they all end up in a loud, smoky club ten minutes away on foot. Peggy nurses a beer and gawks—everyone there is young and undeniably hip. And the music is so, so not for her. But it’s something to watch Michael so enthralled by it, bobbing along—if it weren’t for his age and how he dressed he could be one of them, easy.

She feels Stan’s eyes on her, and they share a look: he mouths something like  _you wanna go?_ and she nods her head in relief. Then Stan gets Michael’s attention, pointing to the door over his shoulder, yelling something in his ear.

Michael looks around, then says to them: “I’m gonna stay for a while.”

“Okay.” Peggy hugs him, briskly. “Bye.”

Then Stan drains his beer and tosses it into the trash, holding the door open for her. She slips past him and they both step out onto the crowded sidewalk, full of loiterers, people trying to get in. Once the door shuts behind them, they look at each other and suddenly bust up laughing.

“You’re right,” he says, his voice barely a wheeze, “we  _are_ too old for this.”

“We’re not old,” she laughs. People turn and look, but it doesn’t matter—it’s funny. They stand there a while longer, patting themselves down for cigarettes, still giggling, until Stan suddenly spots a cab with its light on and runs out onto the curb to wave it down. They climb into the back and sit there, his arm around her shoulder. Peggy turns to him at one point, still smiling, but catches him staring out the window, lost in thought.

She squeezes his hand, hoping to scrub the rest of tonight from her head. To pretend it’s just them again, for a second, before things get too complicated. Even as she tries to talk herself out of the idea that something is wrong, she feels it, somewhere deep in the pit of her chest. Things are complicated enough already. He squeezes back.  

“This music is good,” Michael shouts. “It’s loud and angry, but—I like it.”

“Yeah?” Duke says, clearly only having heard half of what he said. He gestures back vaguely towards the restroom and asks him something—Michael just follows, goes inside and takes a leak, his mind buzzed and idle. He’s washing his hands when Duke zips up his pants and approaches him. He puts his hand on Michael’s back. He turns at him and stares, trying to ignore how he’s fixated on his face—his lips and eyes and ruddy cheeks. Duke just grins like he knows exactly what he wants, and puts his hand down around his waist.

“You wanna come to my place?” he asks.

* * *

“I mean—unless there’s something I don’t know, I’m the last person you’ve been with for what, seven years? So it makes sense, really.”

They’re lying there on top of the sheet, her dress half-unzipped. Tonight’s been an anomaly in more than one way, she thinks, still feeling drunk and sated.

“I don’t think that’s it.” Stan turns his head to her, from where he’s resting it between her stomach and hipbone, his hand still cupped over her knee. “Seriously. It has nothing to do with you.”

“Who was the last girl before me?” When he doesn’t answer right away, she amends: “I’m just curious. You don’t have to tell me.”

“It wasn’t a girl.”

“Oh.” She stops, for a second, trying not to react obviously. She doesn’t know why she’s surprised. Of course she  _knows_ , she’d always intuited it—back when Stan acted like more of a blowhard she suspected he was doing so to protect himself, somehow—but there’s somehow never been an occasion to broach the subject.

“So who would be your ideal guy?” she ventures.

“Peg. C’mon.” He groans, pulling himself back onto the bed, resting his head by her shoulder. “Don’t put me on the spot like this.”

“I’m not! I’m just curious.”

“God, I don't know. I think my type—whatever that even  _means_ —probably goes both ways, you know? I have a universal type.”

“You’re avoiding the question,” she teases.

“Um. Short. Smarter than me.” He shoots her a meaningful glare, but she just snorts. “Incredibly stubborn. Gemini?”

“Stop. Don't turn this around on me.”

“I'm just saying, that's my type.”

“That’s interesting.”

They stay quiet for a while, not quite sure of what they’d just unearthed.

“I’m going to shower,” Peggy says, sitting up.

“Okay.”

She goes to the bathroom and turns on the huge, rusty tap, and waits for what feels like forever for the hot water. Then she ends up spending a long time inside, standing under the stream until her legs get stiff and her skin starts to look faintly pink. When she gets back Stan has just finished rolling a joint, carefully holding it so nothing gets on the sheets, patting down the moistened paper with his thumb. She finds one of his T-shirts from the bottom of the clean laundry bin and pulls it on.

“Michael’s not back yet,” Stan says, once she climbs in next to him. “Think he’s alright?”

“He looked like he was having fun.”

“Yeah. Who was that guy he was with?”

“Joyce Ramsay’s friend.”

“Joyce Ramsay has a lot of friends.” Stan sets the ashtray on his chest and burrows against her shoulder. She plucks the joint from his fingers and drags on it. “Who was  _that_ guy?”

“One of those art school kids she used to teach,” Peggy says, holding in smoke. Then she starts coughing, passing it back to him— “I met him once. He was very—enthusiastic.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing?”

Stan rubs at his temples, wondering if he’s high enough to even start getting into this. Just to assure himself he’s overreacting, he asks: “What time is it?”

Peggy sits up and looks at the clock. “Two-thirty. Why are you so worried about Michael?”

“I don’t know, just—I don’t know. Do you think maybe he’s—”

“He was  _with_ people, Stan. I don’t think he’s in any danger.”

“No,” he says, flatly. “I’m wondering where he and that guy are right now.”

“Oh.” She thinks about it for a second, then wrinkles her nose at him in disgust. “Come on, Stan. You don’t seriously think—”

“I’m not thinking anything.”

“God. Fine.” She reaches out and pushes some hair from his forehead. “Me neither.”

But of course neither of them can get their minds off it.

* * *

Michael closes his eyes and inhales, and the unmistakable sound of water bubbling makes him wonder if he’s slipping. If what he think’s going on is really going on. Then he breaks into a coughing fit. Duke laughs and sets his hand on his back.

“You need a glass of water?” he asks. Michael shakes his head and turns to him. Duke takes the bong out of his hands and sets it on the coffee table.

They’re in his ratty apartment in Brooklyn. Duke jumped the turnstile when they went into the subway, but nobody stopped him; Michael used up his last token. They rode together on the subway in silence, alone except for a few suits and a bum sprawled across the corner bench. When they first sat down Duke put his arm on the back of the seat behind him, like it was nothing, like he did this all the time, like he wasn’t afraid.

It makes him somewhat less afraid. Michael knows he must want this to happen, too, or it wouldn’t be happening. He wouldn’t have let him put his arm around him on the way home. He wouldn’t be letting him put his hand above his knee right now, just barely hinting upward. He wouldn’t let him grab his chin and touch his lower lip with his thumb, parting them open, allowing his jaw to relax in his hand. He notices, seemingly out of nowhere, that he’s gotten a hard-on.

Then it all happens, in hazy and rapid succession. He unzips Michael’s pants and undoes the top button, and then suddenly he’s lying back on the couch while Duke kisses him, his tongue tracing his lip, heavy with beer. He feels for Michael’s cock through his underwear, wraps his hand around it. Something jolts in him and he nearly jumps out of his seat. Duke pulls his hand away and Michael finds himself gasping for air.

“You’re cute,” Duke says, stopping to unzip his own jeans. “Can I suck your dick?”

“Um—sure,” Michael almost guffaws, like the idea is absurd. “I mean  _yes_ , absolutely. I’d definitely, uh. Yes.”

He laughs, but not in a mean way. It’s still embarrassing. He helps Michael get his pants off, then kneels down and unbuttons his shirt. When he’s undressed Duke sits back on his heels for a second, looking him over shamelessly, palming at his own half-hard cock.

Something about the image is powerful, but it doesn’t last long. He closes his eyes so he doesn’t get too overwhelmed. But he doesn’t—Duke keeps him steady, planted solidly against his thighs. He keeps his hand on his side to keep Michael from jerking forward too quickly, but sometimes strays towards his stomach, rubbing slow circles when the muscles go tense and he shudders.

Michael feels like there’s a hot nail pushing through his head, searing right behind his eye. He’s only scared of losing control, of crossing some immutable line he can never come back from. But he reassures himself he’s already past that point. Way past it.

* * *

 “I mean, I know he said he was in love with you,” he says, sounding defensive. “But come on.”

“How'd you know that?”

“He told me.”

“Then he must have also told you he pretty much—spiraled out of control at SCP after seeing you in a T-shirt.”

“What?”

“Yeah. I think he told me that same night, actually. Maybe in the same breath.”

“Whoa, whoa.” Stan sits up on his elbows, looking at her in disbelief. “Spiraled out like—how?”

She clears her throat. “He, um. Started to have ‘unusual thoughts.’ And then he became convinced the new computer system was controlling his—”

“The antenna thing. Yes.” Stan grimaces. “I don't remember him looking at me in—any kind of way. Not like that. I would have remembered.”

“He said he was looking at your shoulders. You sat facing away from him, remember?”

“My  _shoulders_?” He's starting to laugh, now, not really processing the information at all.

“Sure,” Peggy says, thankfully in on the joke. “You've got great shoulders.”

Stan takes the ashtray off his chest and sets it on the nightstand, turning off the lamp. Then he lies still for a second, turning his head towards her in half-darkness.

“What would you do if he made a pass at me.” It’s hardly a question.

Peggy stares at him, her expression willfully blank, just almost slipping into something “What would you do if he made a pass at  _me_.”

“I don’t really think that’s going to happen.”

“Why? There’s much more evidence on my half.”

“This is insane.” She sits up, running her hands back through her hair. “We’re both being insane.”

Stan doesn’t respond. Instead he just switches the lamp off on his side, and says: “It’s late.”

“Yeah.” She turns the other light out and pulls the sheet over the two of them. Both are too afraid to say anything else.  


	2. heavenly wine and roses

**october 19th-30th, 1976**

Michael wakes up in a cold sweat and starts getting dressed, just throwing on clothes before he even has time to remember where he is, or what he’s supposed to do next. After he gets his shoes on, he stops, trying to assess his surroundings. Then he realizes he’s definitely still drunk, and there are people wondering where he is. But for whatever reason he can’t bear the idea of leaving without some kind of goodbye, so he touches Duke’s arm, shaking it until his eyes open a little.

“Bye,” Michael says.

He smiles, benign, and then turns over on his side. “Bye-bye.”

It’s a quarter to six a.m. A few stops on the 4 and he’s back in his old neighborhood; he starts walking home, just by reflex, only stopping once he sees a bakery unshuttering its windows. Michael waits outside and smokes a cigarette until the shopkeeper notices him and comes around the counter, flipping the _closed_ sign around and unlocking the front door.

When he steps inside, he remembers the place instantly. His father took him here as a kid, after school, as a reward for good grades or unobtrusive behavior, or sometimes to pass a slow afternoon. Even the same faces are behind the counter, but of they don’t recognize him—he’s a stranger, only passing through. He wolfs down a cinnamon babka and a cup of coffee at the counter and leaves a decent tip. Then he uses the rest of his money on cab fare to the apartment and drags himself up two flights of stairs, unlocking the door and crawling onto the couch facedown.

* * *

Peggy doesn’t wake up until ten o’clock—when she sees the numbers blinking on the nightstand, and smells something coming from the kitchen, she swears under her breath. She’d wanted to do her part for once and make breakfast, to make up for the other night. (But her idea of breakfast is coffee and toast and Stan always insists on her eating some kind of protein, or fruit, or something.)

The living room shades are still closed, and she sees the shape of Michael sprawled out on their couch, with the afghan and empty duvet cover halfway on the floor. Stan could have at least gotten out the spare set of sheets or something. And the couch couldn’t really be that comfortable, could it? It was old and smelled faintly of weed and cat piss, no matter how many times they’d put it through the wash, so it had been delegated to the back of the linen closet. It doesn’t matter. She’s sure she’ll end up fussing about it later.

He hands her a plate of scrambled eggs and slightly charred toast with butter and jam—the smell is enticing enough that it doesn’t bother her. Besides, she’s hungover and still in her pajamas, so she’s in no place to complain. Finally she asks, her voice croaky from smoking too much last night: “You know when he got back?”

“Nope. Still think he got laid?”

“Can’t rule it out.”  

She chews her food without really tasting it. She’d hoped things would make sense when it was morning, but her mind doesn’t feel any fresher, and none of what had happened the night before took on any understandable meaning in the daylight.

“I’m going to the office,” she says. “Get some fresh air, do some work. Okay?”

“Sounds good.” Stan seems unperturbed, maybe hungover. He closes the blinds in the kitchen shut and takes his plate to the bedroom.

* * *

They’re sitting on the rug on the bottom floor of Don’s apartment with the curtains drawn, incense burning in its metal holder, the room tuned to silence.

“You don’t feel tired after sitting like this for however long?” Roger asks him, leaning against the back of the couch.

“No.”

Don doesn’t know what it’s supposed to feel like or when the feeling is even going to begin, and the anticipation begins to annoy him. He fixates on the lemon floating in the glass of water, sitting impassively on the coffee table.

“Tell me,” Roger says, standing up and beginning to pace, “what was this place before you bought it? I know you’ve told me before.”

“It was a textile factory.”

“Wasn’t the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory around here?”

“Maybe,” says Don. The wind switches directions and comes through the sliding-glass door, blowing the curtains open and getting ash on the rug. He turns to him, finding it takes longer to put his words together. “When is this supposed to—you know. Start working.”

Roger grins. “We’ve only been here ten minutes. You really claim to meditate?”

“I’m usually alone.” Don closes his eyes briefly, trying to re-adjust to the light. “And it’s usually quiet.”

“Well, this isn’t meditation. You need to be mindful, yes, but you have to keep your senses awake. Otherwise, you just—go into a tunnel.”

“Okay.” He looks up, wishing he would sit down.

Some time passes, and he hears him ask: “Can we open the curtains? It’s actually quite nice out.”

“It doesn’t bother me.”

He’s right—it’s still warm outside, and an impossibly clear day. From the corner of the studio he can see the sunny panel of bright blue sky, the light stretching across the floor. Don gets up and goes to the kitchen, putting fresh water in a kettle and turning on the stove. He's aware of the smell of gas. Roger appears beside him.

“You drink tea now.”

“Sure.” Don looks at him with a nonplussed smile. “I drink tea.”

Roger wanders over to the kitchen island and switches on the transistor, rolling through all the talk stations and stopping on some kind of chaotic jazz-rock hybrid. “I was skeptical my first time, too, you know. I was sure it was a load of horseshit, but”—he has a cigarette in his hand now, seemingly out of nowhere—”things start sneaking up on you, you know?”

“Sure,” he says, for the second time, and waits numbly until he’s aware of the teapot going off. He drops the tea leaves into the bottom of the mug and waits for the water to steep. Then he sits on the floor and finishes it in a few sips, focused on the hot water going down his throat, the steam rising around his face. He pours himself another cup over the leaves.

Roger stands by the window, idly touching the curtains. “You should try lying down. It helps some people, supposedly.”

“I think I’m fine.”  

“Just try to be in the silence.”

But not long after he ends up on the floor, and the boundaries start to dissolve. He’d left his own body like this, before, he thinks, and let his thoughts rapidly unwind, but not of his own volition.  

* * *

Late in the afternoon, her secretary tells her she has a visitor; she already knows who it is. Joyce comes in, fresh from Condé Nast—with bagels, as promised. She strides to her desk and hands her a paper cup of coffee, smirking: “You look tired.”

“Thanks.” Peggy reaches into the bag and takes her bagel, biting into it the second she gets it unwrapped. “I’m still hungover.”

“How was last night?”

“Interesting.”

“You have fun at the party?” Joyce takes a sip of her coffee. “After?”  

Peggy flushes. Was it Joyce that said the thing about if the right party goes as planned, everybody will go home and have sex? It was so long ago, but it still pops into her head anytime she gets invited anywhere.

“It’s alright, you can spare me the details. You two are private people.”

“No, it’s not that.” Peggy tries to compile her thoughts, but can’t find the exact words she wants. “Stan told me—when we were talking, that night—that he’d slept with men before. And then we started talking about Michael.”  

“What about him?”

Even though it’s just the two of them, she feels the need to lower her voice. “He left with a guy last night and didn’t come back until this morning.”

“Oh, Peg.” Joyce does a terrible job at stifling a laugh. “You didn’t know already?”

“Of course I knew,” she insists. “I just didn’t think he was all the way _there_ yet, and—Christ, I’m sorry, Joyce. You’re my only girlfriend and the only thing I ever talk to you about is men.”

“I’m aware,” she says, unflappable as always. “And don’t call me your girlfriend, unless you want people getting the wrong idea.”

“Joyce.”

She grins. “I’m just telling you. Anyway, what’s really bothering you? The fact Stan brought it up, or that you’ll never have a chance with Michael Ginsberg?”

“Stop. I _know_ he’s been attracted to women before.” She feels like a teenager, trying to dress up her bewilderment in terms that feel more mature. “He had a crush on Megan. And at least two of my secretaries. He had a crush on every girl he ever met, as far as I could tell.”

“You can like both, you know. He could definitely be bisexual.”  

“I just—I don’t know. It’s none of our business, but I just keep wondering about it.”

“You three were always weird.”

Peggy conceals a flinch. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“I remember when the three of you were together there was always something else going on. I thought they were both kind of competing for you. But now it’s like—”

“What?”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s like what, Joyce?”

“Calm down.” Joyce reaches into the pocket of her suit jacket and hands her a cigarette out of the case, the tiny wooden one with the Japanese print on it. The nicotine makes her head lighter, but doesn’t dull any of the edges she wishes she could smooth out. “Clearly you’ve got something else on your mind. I won’t prod.”

“I need to go home,” she says abruptly, wrapping up her half-eaten bagel and picking up her coat, cigarette still dangling from her lips. “I’m not getting any work done here.”

“Alright.” Joyce stands up and holds the door open for her; she avoids making eye contact for fear of catching the look on her face. She can still read her like a book. Always has.

* * *

“Bets?”

It feels unnatural coming from his mouth, and he doesn’t really understand what brought her name to the front of his mind—only that he’d heard her briefly, some creak or breath in the room that had maybe evoked her voice, and just like that any convincing memory was gone.

“What was that?” Roger asks, just when Don’s convinced himself he hadn’t heard.

“Nothing.” His mouth still tastes like sugar, even after the pot of tea.  

“I’m sorry about her.”

“It’s fine,” he says, when what he really meant to say was something like _It’s over._ The ugly part had been over for a long time. Don wonders what had happened to the music, then realizes he can still hear Bob Dylan mumbling from the kitchen.

“How are the kids?” Roger asks, after a second.

The kids. It takes a second to realize who he’s talking about. “Sally’s at Barnard. Won’t speak to me. Gene and Bobby are—I don’t know. Henry raised them, not me, really.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Stop being sorry,” Don snaps. “We were both terrible fathers. We tried to be better than our fathers and we accomplished nothing. And now they don’t have to take care of us, when the time comes. It’s a waste of time to be sorry.”

Something about this, perhaps the break in tension after days and days of straining, makes Roger start laughing. Hard. “Sorry,” he says, wiping the tears from his eyes, “it’s not funny. It’s really not.”

* * *

Michael passes between seedy theater after seedy theater, until he finds something that feels safe—a private viewing booth, with a tiny slot to peer into. He barely makes eye contact with the man behind the counter, and he looks over his shoulder too many times, as if someone’s going to recognize him. As if nobody knows exactly what he’s doing. He puts the quarters in the machine and sits, uncomfortably, on the cracked vinyl stool.

There’s no sound. It’s just two men sitting next to each other in an empty-looking set jerking each other off, only wearing shirts. He can’t stop noticing the inherent ugliness of the image, their twisted grainy faces and their legs splayed out in front of them. The way the camera pans voyeuristically, closes in slowly on the blond boy’s face. He doesn’t make it to the end, and goes back out to flip through magazines, noticing the dreary lighting and rubber sex toys in boxes lining the walls. He doesn’t think to ask for his money back, either—on his way out to hail a cab he realizes he doesn’t have enough money, and barely even enough for subway tokens, so he decides to walk it.

* * *

But she doesn’t go home. She leaves, thinking she’s going to go for a walk, but then realizes she’s not properly dressed—the last of the warm weather had trickled out that weekend. She wanders through a department store and looks listlessly at clothes, uninspired by anything she sees hanging on the rack. She goes floor to floor, smells perfumes, drinks a coffee. When she catches sight of a window she notices it’s gotten dark. Finally, just to avoid walking back in the cold, she settles on an inexpensive coat, warm yellow with white trim, and wears it out buttoned up to her neck.

Thinking she’ll catch a cab back on Madison, she turns around and starts heading towards the Roosevelt. It’s a quiet night, the streets empty except for commuters and doormen. From a block away she can see a cab pull in front of the hotel, then two people get out, stumbling onto the curb. She’s sure she’s making things up, but the closer she gets the more she’s convinced—

“Peggy?”

“Oh.” She stops dead in her tracks. It’s Don and Roger.

She’s surprised, but not too shocked that she can’t notice something’s off. They’re both a little disheveled—not unwholesomely, really, just like they’ve been sitting around all day without looking in a mirror.  

“What are you doing here?” says Don.  

“Peggy Olson, you goddamn angel.” Roger throws her into a hug, which is a little disarming, but she pats him on the shoulder and withdraws soon enough. “ _Christ_ I’m glad to see you.”

“Good to see you too, Roger.” He looks more or less the same, she thinks—in better health, still well-dressed, still with the moustache. “I was just coming back from work—what are _you_ two doing here?”

“Just going to dinner,” Roger says. “There’s a French vintage with my name on it, compliments of the manager. Want to come up and have a glass, some steak?”

Then Don blurts out, “We’re tripping acid.” _Oh_. It begins to make more sense. “We had to leave my place, the sun was setting and it—the Roosevelt will be quieter.”

“And the Roosevelt has food that’s not yogurt and granola.” Peggy notices that his pupils are blown up, surrounded by a tiny sliver of blue. She hadn’t noticed with Don, although he’d had that old melancholic look on his face, like he was permanently stuck in a bad memory. Not the calmer Don she’d been getting to know, however slowly. Roger lights up a cigarette, struggling a long time with getting it from the case to his lips. “Jesus, Draper, you still eat meat, don’t you?”

“No, I still do,” Don says, as both of them weave uneasily to the front door. “Peggy, you really should join us. We can finally catch up.”

“Um.” Peggy pulls her handbag onto her shoulder. She’s enticed by the idea of a meal, but not enough to let herself get reeled in. “I’ll leave you two to it. But if you’d like to get dinner sometime—”

“Where are you off to?” Don asks.

“I, um. Stan and Michael are waiting.”

“Michael _Gins_ berg?” Roger cries. “He’s still around?”

“He’s back, but he’s lost,” says Don, self-serious again. “Don’t you agree? He’s got so much potential, but he’s a lost person. There are parts of himself he can’t see, yet.”  

“I agree,” Roger says. “Haven’t seen the kid in what, ten years and I still agree. But he just needs somebody to set him straight.”

“What would you suggest?” she asks. “Really. How do you think he could start working again?”

“Who knows.” Don shrugs, then asks Roger for a puff on his cigarette—he obliges, taking it back from him once he’s done without a glance. “He just needs to put himself out there again.”

“But where?”

Roger flicks the half-burnt cigarette onto the pavement. “That’s for him to figure out. Let’s go, Don—I really am starving. Will I see you around, Pegasus?”

It makes her laugh, but she finds herself cringing afterwards. She pulls Don in for a brisk hug around the shoulder, and tells them: “I’ll see you.” Then they’re gone.

* * *

“So you’ve been living here?”

“Sure. They got me set up right away, same room and everything.”

“Who’s in the apartment?”

“It was Brooks and the kid for a while, and then it was nobody but the housekeeper.” Roger reaches into the icebox and tosses him a can of Coke, then goes to find the liquor. “Actually, Mona helped me get that cancelled. I can’t bear to sell the place, but I don’t even want to know what it looks like after three years.”

“Huh.” It’s the first fluent exchange they’ve actually had since they left Don’s place, and it alarms him. Roger orders up something on the phone, some extravagant dinner with a bottle of wine, asking for only one glass.

“Are you coming down?”

“What?”

“From the trip,” he says. “You seem more restless. Eat something, smoke a little grass, you’ll feel better.”

He says he’s not hungry, but he smokes a few cigarettes and when the food appears he ends up eating, ravenously. Roger, cracking the window, lights up a joint, and hums a little melody to himself: _I’d like to teach the world to sing…_

Don sets his empty plate on the coffee table and leans back onto the couch. “Those poor girls.”

“Who?” he asks. “Margaret and Sally?”

“No.” Don starts fiddling with the tab on his soda can. “The girls in that shirt factory. Can you imagine, being in a burning building and realizing you can’t get out?”

Roger stares at the wine he’s swirling in the bottom of his glass. “Yes,” he says, after a while. He offers him the marijuana and he takes it without hesitating, even though the last time he touched the stuff he was somewhere in northern California with somebody else trying to crack open his soul. Roger’s lucky. He knows him too well for there to be any surprises.

“And who do you blame for something like that?” he says, passing it back to him. “The architect? The fire marshal? Whoever didn’t care enough to make sure those women would be safe.”

“The machine,” Roger says. “They were doing the same thing as us. Just trying to survive in this world—get up and go to work, go make a name for themselves. The only difference is that we got out and they didn’t.”

He understands the sentiment, but Don knows it’s not the same thing. Roger finishes his glass and sticks the cork back in. He calls the front desk, and someone comes to take the plates away. Then he announces his switch to martinis, and Don watches absently as he shakes up the drink, pours it neat, a few chips of ice slipping to the surface.

“Do you want to reflect on anything?” he asks, turning to him from the liquor cabinet.

“Like what?”

“Whatever was going through your mind, at the peak. Sometimes it’s easier to elucidate now.”

“I don’t know,” he says. _Elucidate_ —an inflated, slippery word. He wonders where Roger heard it. Maybe some grammar school thesaurus. He looks willowy and tall, ghostlike, the martini glass poised in his hand. Don wonders what he did back then, what kind of deal he cut to still look so youthful after three coronaries and divorces each. He also notices that, even in the same new suit he got cut every few years (always from the same tailor, always about nine hundred dollars, always in touch with the style) he wouldn’t have looked a hair out of place in some speakeasy fifty years ago, laughing it up with however many girls on his arm.  

“When you’re young, and life seems so boundless,” Roger says, sitting on the edge of the bed, “there’s a certain point where it hits you that there’s only so much you can do. Only so many paths you can take, so many ways you can love someone. But you keep thinking—there must be something else.”

Don looks back up to the ceiling.

“You seem broken by love, Don. You’ve abandoned it.”

“I hurt people,” he says, flatly.

“You hurt yourself, too. You don’t let people in.”

He crosses one arm over his eyes, rubbing at the bridge of his nose. His vision is still wavy, mutating, and he has nothing new to say, only things he’d heard before and already knew. Reaching for a cigarette, he says to himself:  “Nobody loves Dick Whitman.”

“Yeah.” It’s too dark to identify the look on Roger’s face. “So I’ve been told.”

Then no one talks, for a while. Roger, standing up, goes over to the couch and gives Don’s cheek a hollow pat. “I’m going down to the bar, alright? Don’t wait up.”

* * *

“Peg just called—she said she’d bring Chinese,” Stan says, coming down the hall and seeing Michael sinking into the couch. “You’re back awfully late.”

“Sorry.”

“I’m kidding. You’re free to come and go.”

“I just feel bad,” Michael admits. He thinks it’s kind of pithy and self-effacing, but it’s not like there’s a better way to behave. “I promise I’m not going to live rent-free on your couch for the rest of time. You and her have already done _way_ too much—”

“You can’t be serious,” says Stan. “We told you you could stay here as long as you wanted. And honestly, man—don’t tell her I said this, but things have been better since you got here. We missed you. You were—an important presence, in our lives.”

“Oh.”

“I mean—I know you needed time. But we’re glad to have you back.”

“Thanks.”

“No pressure.” Stan gives him that same stupid grin, and while he knows he only wants him to feel better, it twists up something in his stomach, and he waits what feels like forever for the food to arrive, wishing he had something to just completely blot his mind out.

* * *

Don falls asleep, sinking heavily into the couch, and when he comes to again it’s three o’clock in the morning. The room is empty, the bed freshly made at some point after Roger left. Still halfway in a dream, and thinking there’s no way he’ll come back until morning, he kicks his shoes off and climbs on top of the duvet.

He wakes up again to a vague scratching at the door, the key fitting into the lock, and someone stumbling in. Blearily, he eyes his watch in front of him. It’s five o’clock, the pale sunlight coming in through a crack in the curtains.

“Don,” he rasps, crawling onto the bed. “Fuck. Is that you?”

“What’s wrong.” He’s too tired to phrase it as a question, but there’s a waver in his voice, some dark cloud settling over the two of them as Roger yanks his jacket off, shifting around chaotically.  

“I don’t know what I’m doing. I really don’t know what the hell I’m doing, Don. I’m so goddamn lonely, and”— _oh god_ he’s really crying, he hasn’t seen him this bad since he had to hold his hand in the back of an ambulance, and even then the whole time he was blubbering over Mona and how careless he had been, how unworthy he was—”everybody just leaves, Don, you know that. Can you just—can you hold me, or something, so I know I’m not dying, I'm not a fucking ghost already?”

“Roger.”

“You prick,” he spits, “you have _nothing_. You have nothing else to lose.”

He considers, momentarily, Roger’s breath smelling of gin rickeys and caviar and God knows what else. Don extends his arm and he latches around him right away, clinging to the back of his shirt, heel of his palm pressed hard between his shoulders.

“I’m afraid of doing this again,” Don says.

Roger just sniffs, his head fitting easily into his shoulder. “Nothing else to lose,” he repeats, softer.  

When he wakes up, it’s nine o’clock, and the bed is empty again, save for the black scuffs of shoe polish on the white bedspread.

* * *

A week later Michael’s sitting at the bus stop, doing nothing, when he sees someone coming out of a drugstore, holding a portfolio—tan coat, blue shirt, no tie. His hair’s a little bit grayer, but it’s the same shape, slicked up like a cartoon devil; he could pull Don Draper out of a crowd anywhere. And when Michael crosses the street and waves him down, his reaction is nowhere near what he expected. Don looks up in instant recognition, and smiles broadly, genuinely.

“I heard you were back in town,” he says, striding towards him. “Why don’t I buy you lunch?”

“That’s awfully kind of you.”

“I’m serious. Come with me.”

Who is he to say no? He walks with him a few blocks to some soda fountain, tiny with pea-green counters. Don gets a Coke, so Michael does, too; perhaps enlivened by how all-American it is, he decides to order a cheeseburger.

The waiter looks surprised and points to the sign in the window. “Kosher.”

“Oh.” He’s caught off guard—the place looks like any other ordinary lunch counter. “Alright, um, grilled cheese.”

Don orders a flat-iron steak, which Michael thinks is a bizarre order in any restaurant. The look on the waiter’s face says it all: two goyim completely out of their depth. It hits him suddenly why he brought him here—when he turns back to Don, his expression is unreadable.

“I’m not a practicing Jew, you know,” he says, deciding to get it out of the way. “I guess you were just being polite, but—”

“I didn’t think anything of it,” Don says. “It was just nearby.”

He knows that’s probably bullshit, but is willing to ignore it.

“I invited you to lunch because I wanted you to be the first copywriter I hire.” Don hands him a sheaf of photos in a folder, all of women in slick clothes—fur coats, suits, short dresses, leather boots with blocky heels. “Our first commission is from this clothing line. I want ten ideas for taglines, each. Can you do that?”

“Sure I can.” He stares down at them, realizing he has no idea where to start. “Um.”

“Not right now. Bring them Monday morning.” He opens his billfold and hands him a twenty-dollar bill. “Your advance.”

“Right.” He stares down at the cash, just now realizing he doesn’t have a wallet to put it in. “Um—can I ask who you’re doing this for, now?”

“No one,” Don says. “I’m opening my own private firm.”

“Oh. So all this time you just wanted to run your own company?”

“No. It’s not going to be hierarchal—it’s a network of creators and managers. Everyone pulls their own weight.”

“Huh.”

Neither of them say anything for a while—they eat their food in silence, then Don picks up the check. On the way out, he gives him a business card with an address downtown printed on it, and then goes to cross the street while the walk sign blinks away, disappearing into the crowd.

* * *

Peggy’s drinking wine, watching Julia Child, and beginning to feel despondent when Michael unlocks the door. He’s holding a portfolio and looking skittish, like a cat that’s just been snuck up on. Before she has the chance to ask, he’s blurting it out: “I met _Don_ out of the blue today. And he gave me a job. Can you believe that?”

“Seriously?”

“He’s opening his own studio, or something. I think—if I don’t fuck this up—he might hire me on full-time.”

“Of course you won’t,” Peggy says, colorlessly. “He’s—wait, he’s doing what?”

“He said he’s living in this building he bought, that he’s going to turn into an office. He wants it to be like The Factory. I don’t know what the fuck that means, but—”

“Good for him.” She can’t quite parse the information she’s been given yet, too hung up on the fact Don had told her absolutely nothing about this. (Well—there had been plenty things _she_ hadn’t told him, but that was just the nature of their relationship.)

“I’m still in shock. Um, anyway—do you want to get high?”

Peggy’s caught off guard by the question and how unnatural it sounds coming from him, but manages not to laugh. “Sure. I can’t remember where Stan keeps his stuff. Neither does Stan, most of the time.”

“No, I got my own.” He pulls a lumpy-looking joint out of a pack of cigarettes. She’s surprised—he always claimed to hate the stuff, although he was known to make judgments without much pretext.

“What’s the job for?” she asks, while he twists the end of the joint against the open flame gingerly. He comes back, opens the portfolio on the coffee table and spreads some of the pictures out.

“Some fancy clothing store,” he says.

“It is fancy.” She picks up a glossy of a woman wearing a mink. “Who are they selling this to?”

“I don’t know,” Michael says, flipping through one of the magazines Don left him, opening a centerfold full of all kinds of shoes. “I feel like you could get a coat exactly like that one at Saks, not some dump in the Village.”

“So you have to figure out what would make them go _there_ , instead of Saks. How they see themselves wearing it.” Internally, she warns herself not to get too involved, but a little advice can’t hurt. She takes the end of the joint from his fingers and ashes it in an empty cup. “Where’d you get this?”

“Washington Square.”

“That’s awfully brave.”

“The guy practically foisted it on me,” he says,  holding the smoke in until it escapes in a watery cough. “Anyway, Don’s place is right by here—haven’t you seen it?”

“No.”

“Aren’t you friends?”

“I mean, we’re not as close as we once were.” She takes the little paper cone from his fingers and takes a drag, closing her eyes. “He comes and visits McCann sometimes. And—I actually ran into him and Roger, the other day.”

Michael snorts. “That old prick’s still around?”

“Somehow.”

Michael starts to play with the flap on the matchbook. “Did you mention me?”

“Just in passing.” She thinks. “He was, um. They were both on LSD.”

“Really?” Michael looks scandalized, and it makes her laugh. “That’s insane.”

“Roger does it all the time. He’s into—that whole lifestyle, doing drugs, sleeping around and calling it ‘free love.’ It’s just so he can convince people he’s still young at heart.” She guesses there’s no reason Michael would have known about this, even though it had been going on well into his time at SCDP.

“Then why was he with _Don_? He’s like a vampire.”

“I don’t know.” She reaches over to the armrest to pull on a sweater—she’d turned the heat on a while ago, but only to the first notch on the dial. In the distance, she hears a muffled clang from the radiator. “Don’s the only person he doesn’t regularly piss off. But I don’t know if that’s true anymore.”

“I mean, he fucked his ex-wife’s mother.”  

“Thank you for putting it so succinctly,” she says, louder than expected, raising her hand in relief. “No one wants to just _say it_. It still shocks me how men can get past things like that.”

“I mean—it’s her _mother_.”

“I _know_.”

“What’s going on with them, really?”

Peggy winces. When he’s obviously about to prod further, she concedes: “I don’t know. A long time ago there was—something happened between them, I don’t know what, and it hasn’t been the same since. I think they’re trying to just approximate whatever they had before.”

“Huh.” They stay quiet for a minute, Michael puffing on the nearly-finished stub of the joint. She thinks, for a minute, about what she’d just said—something she’d known, but never really put to words before. She wonders what the two of them are trying to approximate now. Then she notices her glass is almost empty, so she freshens it.

“If I get this, I think things will really start coming together. Finally. So I can get out of your hair, you know?”

“You know you haven’t been bothering us.”

“Yeah, I know, but it’s no way for a grown man to live.”

When he looks away for a second she realizes she feels like crying. It has to be the wine, or her period, or just some culmination of everything that had happened over the past week, but she just sees Michael sitting there and has to say _something_.

“I’m so sorry about what happened to you.” He turns around, surprised, and she’s left there in an awkward gasp of air when she doesn’t know what she’s going to say next. “I’m so sorry I never visited, or wrote, or anything. I wish I could have—I don’t know. I don’t know what I could even do to—”

“It’s okay,” he says. “I get it.”

She can’t help herself. Peggy leans over on the couch and squeezes him, tight, her arms around his shoulders. He stays there for a few reluctant seconds, then reciprocates, his hand resting awkwardly on her back.

“I should have come and seen you,” she says, into his hair. “You needed someone.”

“It shouldn’t have been you.”

Suddenly the door unlocks, and both of them pull away to look. It’s Stan, but—

“Sorry.” He raises his hands helplessly. “I’m sorry. He just—said he had to come in and—”

Then an older, portly man in suspenders comes through the door. Peggy recognizes him right away. The last time she saw Michael’s father, she remembers, she was distinctly very stoned—actually, not unlike now—

 

“Pops.” Michael stands up, stepping towards the door, trying to keep him from coming inside further. Finally he sees that the look on his face isn’t angry. He doesn’t even say anything at all, at first, surveying the room and its warm wood floors.

“Come downstairs with me,” Morris says. Michael almost turns back to them, for some look of approval, but he knows he doesn’t really have any choice. He follows him out the door, watching him go down a flight of stairs and sit on the landing. Michael sits next to him, leaning against the banister.

“What are you doing, cavorting with that married woman?” he asks, when the door at the top of the stairs is shut.

“She’s not married,” he says, trying to keep his voice just above a whisper. “She’s just my friend.”

“She lives with that man. And you live with _them_.”

“It’s temporary,” he says, “just until I get back on my feet. Which should be soon. I’ve already got a job. Don Draper gave me a freelance project—maybe you don’t realize how important that is, but—”

“So you’re back doing what, writing slogans for brassieres? Don’t you remember how you hurt yourself, last time?”

“It’s not like that anymore. This could be something real. All my life you’ve been guiding me towards these—things I don’t want, things that aren’t right for me, stuff you don’t _understand_ , and then you get angry when I don’t—”  

“Why would I be angry?” he says, turning to him. Michael can’t bring himself to meet his gaze. “I only wanted your happiness. I did what I thought was right for you, but I clearly failed.”

“Don’t say that. You know it’s not your fault. It’s just me—I just screw up every opportunity I get—”

“You are sick,” says Morris. It isn’t meant to sting, but it shocks him into sitting up straight, his chest hollow. “But you’ve improved. And I cannot take care of you anymore.”

Michael stays quiet for a second, trying not to fidget. He cracks a knuckle, the joint at the base of his index finger. “I know. But who’s going to take care of you?”

The look on his father’s face is a specific, pungent kind of exasperation, almost despair towards Michael’s lack of understanding. “There is a community of people all around you that are eager to help. People you could connect with. If you let them in—”

“I can’t!” he blurts, louder than he wants. “I’m not like them.”

“You think you are the only person who feels out of place in this world? You are from a generation of lost children.”

It’s so grandiose, so melodramatic, that Michael knows it has to be at least a little true. He says nothing. Morris folds his hands in his lap, stares off. “I blame myself. I shouldn’t have allowed your mother to stay in France. I should have pulled her off the platform and onto the train with our father. You could have been born in Sweden—things could have been so different.”

He hasn’t heard this before. Not like he hasn’t pried for details on his mother in the past— especially during a bout of obsessive compulsion near the end of high school where he tried to find a crack in the story, raiding family journals and photographs for some evidence of fabrication. Some scrap of truth buried in the whole thing.

“So you’ve been thinking about her, then?” he says, meaninglessly. “My mom?”

“Sarah was foolish. And stubborn. And I mourned my mistake for decades, thinking taking you to America would amend it. But now I know there is nothing I could have done, to prevent you from this life, this unhappiness. It is simply our birthright.”

“Pops.” Michael rubs at the bridge of his nose. “Please, just—enough.”

“There’s nothing left to say. I have some things for you.”

Morris points to the trunk sitting at the bottom of the stairs. Then he pulls an envelope out of his vest and tells him to open it—Michael tears at the flap with his fingers. Inside is a check for sixteen hundred and fifty dollars, written in his neat, tiny script.

“This is all there’s left set aside. I trust you’ll use it wisely.”

Michael wants to cry right then and there, wants to throw himself onto his shoulder and apologize for everything, turned into a little kid again. But he doesn’t. Instead he puts the check in his shirt pocket, thanks him quietly, and hugs him. He can’t imagine how he must feel.  

“Go back upstairs,” Morris says, once he steps away. “Be with your friends.”

 

“Then what did he say?”

“That’s it.” They’re crowded around together in the living room, Stan next to him on the couch, Peggy on the ottoman, little circles deep in the carpet from where she dragged it over. Michael has the check in his hand and wishes someone would take it away from him, before he smudges the ink or starts to tear at it or something.

“I’m sorry, man,” Stan says, reaching for his shoulder. “I have no idea what I’d do if my father did that.”

“He’s not my father.” Silence. That sounds bad coming from him, he realizes, so he amends: “My father was some lunatic who thought nobody would really come for some commie Jew professor and his wife.”

It’s still quiet. He’s made it worse. Michael looks down at the check again, at the _1,650_ burning into his brain. The note at the bottom just says _for Michael_ , because Morris was rarely poetic, almost utilitarian in the way he thought and spoke to him, to everyone. That had to be the only thing they really had in common—they both never minced words.

“What are you going to do now?”

“I don’t know. Use some of the money to get a place. Hope Don hires me on for this project.”

“Um.” Stan looks over at Peggy, and Michael braces himself for the worst. “You know this building’s got an attic room. It’s not much, but it’s got everything.

“We’d be happy to rent it out to you, is what he’s saying.” Peggy keeps smiling at him, always meeting his eyes when he looks. “It’s eighty a month.”

“Eighty a month?” he crows. “I’m not a pauper. I can pay you more than that.”

“We insist.”

“Don’t insist! You don’t have to do something just because you feel sorry for me.”

“I mean—” Stan clears his throat. “You don’t have to decide right now. God knows you can find a place for yourself with that kind of money. We just thought we’d offer.”

“We like having you around,” Peggy says. She must be able to tell he’s uncomfortable, though, or she wouldn’t stand up, then tap Stan’s shoulder to get his attention, shift the moment away from the minutes-old drama: “Babe, should we blow off that thing?”

“Which thing?” Michael asks.

“We got invited to another party at Joyce’s, for Halloween or something. I figured none of us were in the mood, so I was going to call her—”

“I’d go.” Michael looks between both of them.

“You sure?” Stan asks, but doesn’t really look opposed.

“I could stand to get my mind off things.”

* * *

But they show up earlier this time, and the crowd is different—a little more sparse and relaxed, and some people are actually dressed up. Michael gets waved off by some people that recognize him, strangely enough, and Stan’s left to fix drinks for the two of them. In retrospect, he wishes he’d stayed home, even if it would have thrown everyone else’s plans.

“So which one of these kids do you think I’m going to end up working for?” Stan asks, handing Peggy her drink.

“Come on. No one dressed like Jughead is going to replace you.”

“I know, but I can’t rule it out.” He slips his arm around her waist and keeps looking into the crowd, finally catching sight of Michael in the corner. “Is that the guy he was with?”

Peggy squints. “I think so.”

“He’s young.”

“So is Michael.”

“Yeah.” He breathes out, half-chuckling, half appalled. “We really _are_ too old.”

“Stop it. Everyone feels that way, but it doesn’t mean it’s true.”

“I meant for Michael. He doesn’t need us anymore.”

She doesn’t respond, which makes him think he has a point. But then she turns to him and says: “Why else would he come back?”

* * *

“You still want that nightcap?” Duke asks him, his arm slinking around Michael’s elbow.

Then he sees Stan and Peg, staring. There’s nothing embarrassing about it, necessarily, but he suddenly is overwhelmed by the idea that he needs to get out of here—back to the couch, out of sight of all these strangers, where things are at least a little more predictable.

“Um.” Michael looks down into his drink, his neck feeling hot. “Maybe another night. Okay?”

“Alright.” The poor guy seems surprised. But he squeezes his elbow, and slips off into the crowd. Michael makes his way back.

“Ready to go?” he asks.

“We were waiting on you,” Stan says, the both of them smiling.

* * *

“Let me get you an extra blanket,” Peggy says, her voice louder, tipsier than usual, stumbling off to the closet. “It’s cold tonight.”

Stan’s sitting on the opposite end of the couch and trying to roll a joint, but he keeps getting distracted and looking somewhere else, and then accidentally spills the weed out again and has to start over, so he gives up and puts the tray on the coffee table. Then he moves over towards Michael, who’s lying under the afghan in a T-shirt, his knees up. Stan puts his arm on the back of the couch.

“So you like that guy Duke, huh?”

“Yeah,” Michael says, still looking guarded.

“I’m sorry if we kept you from spending time with him. We were just—”

“No, it’s fine,” he says, abrupt but firm. “I don’t think it’s going to work between us, anyway.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know, he’s just really _young_ , and there’s just...way too much going on. And he knows virtually nothing about my—”

“Here,” Peggy calls, coming into the room with a wool blanket. Michael tries to take it from her, but she refuses. “No, hold on. Just lay back. I’ve got it.”

She spreads the blanket over him, then sits down beside the sofa, propping her elbow on the armrest. “Is that comfortable?”  

“Yeah, um. Thanks, Peg.”

“You’re welcome.” She embraces him by the shoulders. “And I’m sorry—I’m so sorry I was so rude to you. You know I didn’t mean it. We both love you.”

“It’s true,” Stan says, after a pause.

Michael looks like he doesn’t know what to say. Stan reaches over and gives his knee a little shake, trying to keep things lighthearted. Peggy can be an emotional drunk.

“I’m serious. We both care about you so much. I don’t want you to ever think that I was angry, or—”

Michael stops her. “It’s fine. I know.”

Then Peggy kisses his cheek, briskly. Stan doesn’t really know what to do, then, so he just sort of strokes Michael’s knee with his thumb and hopes for the best, trying to keep his expression neutral when he turns to him, his eyes big and worried.

“You’ve already done so much already,” says Michael, beginning to hem and haw and shuffle around, spreading the blanket across his lap. When he sits up, Stan notices the beginnings of a purplish bruise under his collar, deftly hidden. Then he sees his lips—pink, swollen, the way they would look after necking in a bathroom for half an hour. It inspires something unfamiliar in him. Maybe worry. Maybe something more dangerous.

“We’re happy to. Really.”

And then there is—a moment, a volatile moment, where Stan doesn’t really know what anyone’s next move will be. Thankfully Michael breaks the stillness and tugs at the collar of his shirt, trying to pull the neck up higher. He knows Stan saw it. When his eyes fall on him he just winces in self-defense.

“Don’t look at me like that,” he laughs. “You know I don’t care if some guy gave you a hickey.”

But it’s pertinent he mentioned it. Stan knows what door he’s opening, as if he hasn’t already stepped over every boundary straight guys are supposed to have with other supposedly straight guys. And Peg is—he doesn’t even know what’s going on with her—

“Did he really?” She perks up as soon as he speaks, trying to get a look at Michael’s neck. “I haven’t had a hickey since secretary school.”

“That’s not true,” Stan interjects. “You liar. I emptied a paycheck on a scarf from Saks so you wouldn’t talk.”

“He bought me this Hermés scarf because he felt bad,” she says, to Michael. “He acts like I held him hostage or something—I thought it was a sweet gesture.”

“I’m always sweet.”

“You are.” She tugs on his collar, and inadvertently Stan finds himself dragged down to sit on the floor. She’s kissing him, rather ambitiously, the way people are supposed to kiss in private. When they break away his eyes open for just a second, looking to Michael—he notices the warmth near his hand, resting on the couch right against his leg. Michael is looking back. Something in his head locks shut.

“Um.” Stan sits up, grabbing the corner of his sleeve and wiping his chin. “We’ve all had a lot to drink. Why don’t we...”

“Yeah.” Michael’s looking at him, but in the moment he seems far away and undefinable. “Let’s call it a night.”

He gets up and takes Peggy’s hand, helping pull her to her feet. He asks Michael if he wants the light off, and he says yes, so he goes to flip the switch and has to go down the hall in near-darkness, feeling eyes still on him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry for my poor attempt at recreating an acid trip! but then again, the show was never accurate with it either. also, thank you for your good good comments and support, yall rock my world !


	3. just a complicated game

**november 28th-december 10th 1976**

“Go and run through the pitch. Do it five times, ten times, just until you’re sure you’re confident about it. Then just—go talk to people, loosen yourself up. Remember what it feels like to really be listened to. You want them to feel like they’re talking to their best friend.”

“But I’m not their best friend,” Sharon says, hovering above Peggy’s desk. “They’ve known me for five minutes.”

“That’s enough time to convince them. You just have to bring the right energy.”

“ _Energy_.” She frames it in annoyed air quotes, pacing around her desk for the fourth or fifth or millionth time. She has these loud plastic bangles on, clacking up and down her wrists, and beads swinging frantically from her neck. Peggy starts to wonder if she’s made the right choice. Sharon’s the smartest out of all the girl copywriters, but easily the most unkempt. “You say you’re not superstitious, you think fate is bullshit, and you’re talking to me about ‘energy?’”

“That’s your problem, Sharon. You don’t know how to read a room.” She leans back in her chair. “I gave you this because I know what it feels like to not be taken seriously. This account is a  _big deal_. So I need you to take it seriously and go practice. And—put your hair back. Maybe borrow some lipstick.”

She looks surprised, and leaves quietly. Maybe she’d been unnecessarily harsh, Peggy thinks, but God knows it’s not any worse than any other tongue-lashing she’d endured from Don in the past.  _God_  knows she wouldn’t have paid Sharon any attention if she hadn’t seen something in her. She was just too young to realize that any sense of investment at all was meaningful—she didn’t have time to do it out of pity.

“I’m going to lunch, okay?” she tells her secretary on the way out the door—this new one is named Helen, with pin-straight red hair and a warm round face. The old girl got passed over to the front desk. “I’ll be back in time for Clinique.”

“You've got La Grenouille at seven.”

She pulls on her new yellow coat, which is no longer new (or warm enough.) “Remind me with who?”

“The Calvin Klein rep and her husband. I got a message to Mr. Rizzo about it.”

“You don’t have to do that,” she says, then reminds herself she’s only doing her job. “I mean—thank you. I appreciate it. But I can just tell him.”

Then she slips out through the back stairwell, artfully brushing past two kid copywriters that had been talking in a corner, scared stiff the second she came through the door. Downstairs, the art department is noisy and filled with smoke. They wouldn’t even give Stan his own office after God knows how many years, eternally committed to the communal setup, so usually when they meet it’s in the kitchen, with Peggy sitting on the counter, drinking stale coffee and stealing his cigarettes.

“The new girl called me on my bullshit,” she tells him, her coat spread over her lap. “About not believing in omens. But she can’t figure out that bad luck and bad preparation aren’t the same thing.”

“You believe in omens,” he says flatly, propping his elbow on the counter, keeping an eye on the other side of the partition. “You’re always talking about how you just have a  _bad feeling_. You cross yourself all the time.”

She frowns. “That’s not the same.”

“I’m sure she’ll be fine. How’s Ginzo?”

“I didn’t see him.” She sniffs and takes the cigarette from between his fingers. “Can we go take a walk or something, maybe get some lunch?”

Stan stops for a second in thought, running his fingers along the linoleum. “You’re agitated.”

Without thinking, she gives him her worst exasperated glance. He doesn’t wither even a little. “You know I’d normally say yes. But nothing will get done if I’m not here. Do you want to just hang out for a while, eat half a sandwich? Maybe get in a nap on the couch?”

“You always know what to do,” she sighs, and he goes to look in the fridge.

* * *

What neither of them mentioned that night, however long ago it had been, was that the stairs to the attic were right in Stan and Peggy’s living room, and the rent was cheap for a reason. It was furnished with whatever the previous tenants had left behind—a desk with a cheap linoleum top, a torn-up armchair, crates and boxes full of junk on top of which Michael folded his clothes. While the room was insulated, sometimes chunks of foam would come down from the ceiling, or he’d find himself peeling it away from the walls by his desk, or chipping at the paint on the ancient bedframe (which came down from the wall—a complete novelty.) Everything was either some shade of brown or coated in white drifts of dust.

Despite all this, he felt like he’d carved out a near-perfect space for himself—even a few feet more would have gone unused, or felt like too much. And it got just the right amount of light, even as it was rapidly beginning to disappear behind the neighboring buildings in the late afternoon. And in the corner, balanced on a rusty stand, there was an old TV. It wasn’t like it got a decent picture, or that he used it that much, but he’d never had his own before.

But he’d never really stopped living with them. He was attuned to the sound of the lock in the door, completely used to always hanging around in earshot. Before he’d moved up there, he was sure that part of the deal must have included living somewhat separately from the two of them. Instead he’d become a permanent fixture.

“How did it go?” he asks, once the two of them are back. He’s sitting on the ladder with a paper delivery menu in his hands—the centerfold is a badly-lit photo of different Chinese dishes on a glossy red tablecloth.

“Boring,” Stan says, pulling his coat off and throwing it on the ottoman. “This woman’s idiot husband kept trying to engage me on  _golf_. But I’m full of French food, so it wasn’t all bad.” He turns to Peggy, depositing her jewelry into the dish on the bureau, and adds: “As for the business half—that went well, I think, right, babe?”

“It did.” She smiles, walking over to the couch. “They’re sending me to assist the shoot in L.A.”

“They offered to comp the hotel room,” Stan tacks on, just remembering. He flops onto the free end of the couch, always sinking in at the same angle, in the same pose with his hand just above his stomach. “Supposed to be by the beach and everything.”

“Congratulations,” Michael says. He looks at Peggy, and the dreary wood paneling on the wall behind her. She sees him looking and smiles, reflexively.

“Yeah.” Stan reaches over and pats her knee. “I wish I could come.”

“You've got family to deal with,” she says. He shoots her a weary look:  _don't remind me_. Just as Michael’s about to come down into the living room, she stands up. “I’m exhausted, honestly. I don’t know why we had to do this tonight.”

“It  _was_  incredible, though,” Stan says.

“It was.”

On his way to the bedroom, he spots Michael, still sitting there with the menu in his hand. “Man, don’t order that stuff twice in the same week. I can just cook you something.”

“Too late,” he says, to which Stan rolls his eyes and half-groans. After he wishes him good night, he goes upstairs, trying to ignore the sound of the two of them talking below him, muffled by the wooden floorboards.

After what feels like another hour, someone finally shows up with dinner. He gives the delivery man a decent tip and climbs up to the attic with the paper bag under his arm.

* * *

“It was  _clearly_  meant to just be the four of you. I’m sorry, Don, you have to tell me this kind of thing beforehand. I never can tell when I’ve worn out my welcome.”

“Stop apologizing,” Don says, too flatly to be reassuring. “I think Sally was just glad she had someone else to talk to.”

“Poor Sally.” They’re walking out of Grand Central onto Lexington, the streets choked with busy taxis. “No girl her age should be subjected to raising two boys.”

“She’s been groomed for it her whole life,” says Don. “Why would she stop now?”

Not there was anything wrong with the boys in the first place. Gene had grown into a quiet boy, just reaching that awkward age, and Bobby had gotten a little more lucid, preparing for the performance of a mature young man—while Gene was fiddling with his silverware, his brother never stopped looking Don in the eye, his jaw locked and shoulders straight. They both had their mother’s face, all delicate features and blue eyes. Sally, just barely twenty-three, was the only one who looked anything like him.

Walking astride him, Roger’s off in his own world. “And you don’t think your kids were concerned that the only person they’ve seen their father in public with in a year is estranged alcoholic Uncle Roger?”

“Who was I supposed to bring,” Don says, “a date?”

“Fair point.” He lights a cigarette—Don steals one out of his case. They keep walking a while, just enjoying the night, until Don waves down a cab with its lights on. 

“Listen,” Roger says, getting close before they step inside. “I meant what I said about overstaying my welcome. If at any point you need me out of your hair—just say so.”

“I already said you could stay, didn’t I?”

“You did,” he mutters as Don gives the driver the address, and they start the long drive downtown. 

* * *

She’d given him a quick hug around the shoulders before she left for the airport, and then she was gone. Stan resists the urge to stay late at the office doing nothing, or to wander into a bar on his way back—he has to keep the routine afloat for everyone's sake. When Michael shows up, he’s a bit startled that there’s a whole dinner in production.

“Get your own plate,” Stan tells him, hunting through the cabinet for the right bottle of wine. “You do anything today?”

“No.” It wasn’t like he didn’t have work, but there was a lot of time to fill during the day, and the team was disorganized. “More brainstorming. More people looking at me like I know what I’m talking about.”

“Welcome to the rest of your career,” he grins.

“And the weirdest thing happened,” Michael says, abruptly in a confessional mood. He busies himself fixing a plate of spaghetti to avoid eye contact. “I was killing time walking back from the office, and I got hit on.”

“By who?”

“By some guy at a bookstore.” He turns to Stan, wide-eyed and incredulous. “He asked me to come to the bathroom with him. Can you believe that?”

Stan laughs, but in a wincing way. “There’s all kinds of people cruising in places like that. I wouldn’t be too surprised if they thought—”

“That’s not the worst part. The worst part is I almost said yes.”

“Huh.” Stan uncorks the wine and sits down. “Why didn’t you?” Wrong question.

“I don’t know.” Michael is holding his empty glass upside-down, the stem between his fingers. “At first there was something exciting about it. But it doesn’t go anywhere unless you really try and—I don’t want to try.”

He pours them both wine, and they eat in silence. When the awkwardness is more pronounced, Stan goes to the record shelf and starts leafing through it. He realizes there’s nothing he wants to listen to right now anyway. Alex Chilton sneers at him, accusatory, from the back of a Big Star album.

"You know what the real problem is? I’m too old for that entire—world. For that music, for anything.”

“You’re not old. You’re a baby.”

“Shut up. I’m thirty-four.”

“Really? You’re older than I thought.” Stan scratches at his beard. “I guess you were still, like, twenty-five in my head.” He hears Michael scoff, and he wonders if he somehow offended him—his expression seems neutral as he scrapes and rinses his plate.

“Anyway,” Stan says, once the water is off. “You know I’ll never judge you, whatever you choose to do.”

“I know,” Michael says, too quickly to convince him.

“Want to watch TV, or something?”

“Sure.”

* * *

But there’s something wrong with the tube, so they go upstairs to the attic; Stan brings a joint he rolled earlier and the rest of the wine. The station is showing  _Mildred Pierce_ , which Michael’s never seen, to Stan's absolute horror. The whole time, though, Michael feels jumped-up and miserable, and refuses to think about why, at least not for too long at a time. Nothing had visibly changed, but he’d felt an instant shift in the room the minute he’d brought up the bookstore. Like he’d pushed everything off balance. That balance—which he knew was precarious to begin with—was what he was trying not to acknowledge.

Not to mention Stan’s slightly more morose (and drunk) than usual. He sees him tearing up when Joan Crawford’s daughter drops dead of pneumonia, and by the time the first husband shows up at the end, he’s turned away a bit, staring straight ahead at the screen even when Michael tries to engage him.

“Great movie, right?” he says, when the credits are over. The channel is signing off with the national anthem, a grainy flag furling across the tiny screen.

“Yeah,” Michael says. “She’s great.”

“Do you ever think that in another life, you were meant to work in the movies?”

“Not really. I don't have a thick enough skin.” He tries to make it sound like a joke, but doesn't succeed. "I mean, maybe you're meant to. But in a way, I feel like advertising's better than the movies—there's less prestige, sure, but at least  _everybody_ sees them."  

“I don’t want to do that forever,” Stan says. “I don’t want to be  _t_ _here_ forever. Thinking about it just makes me sad.”

“What would you do instead?”

“I don’t know. Maybe just paint, and look after the house. Make sure Peggy's taking care of herself. And you.” 

“You'd get bored.” 

“You're probably right.” He stares up at the ceiling, ashtray on his chest. Then he turns to him. “I'm glad you're here with us. You know that, right?”

“Yeah, I know,” he says. Then it's quiet, the room only lit by the lamp next to the bed, and eventually he can't fight his eyes fluttering shut. 

When he falls asleep, he dreams of Joan Crawford glowering from one scene to the next, collapsing in some man's arms, film-noir lighting and wandering hands—hours later, it grows visceral enough that he jolts awake. The first thing he sees, as usual, is the empty wasp’s nest clinging to the rafters. It had been bashed in slightly with a broom handle at an unspecified time. Then he feels the ancient, unignorable urge to jerk off. It’s not his fault; he’s barely needed or had the interest in masturbating recently. Half-asleep, barely remembering where he is or who he's with, he tries to discreetly stick his hand down the front of his jeans. He turns his head into the pillow, trying to mask the sound of any breathing.

Then he feels the mattress creak and he stops where he is, yanking his hand away. But it’s too late. Stan’s looking over him, propped up on his elbow.

“Ginzo?”

“I’m sorry,” Michael stammers, “I was—”

“Hey,” Stan breathes, closing in on him from behind, putting a hand on his shoulder, “it’s alright, buddy, you’re fine. I’m right here. You’re fine, aren’t you?”

His thumb touches behind Michael’s ear, tracing the curve of his skull, down to the nape of his neck. Michael swallows and waits a second, as if it’s even a real decision, and finally just nods, feeling the blood rush to his face. Then Stan puts his arm over him, his hand sliding down his front and stopping before the button on his jeans. He waits, suddenly hesitant.

“This is okay. Right?”

“Yeah. It’s okay.”

“That night,” he breathes, just playing with the waistband on his briefs. “On the couch, when I had my hand on your knee. Were you turned on?”

Michael swallows, his throat gone dry. “Yeah.”

“You touch yourself, once we left?”

He nods.

“I thought I was just being insanely selfish. I thought I was going crazy how much I was thinking about you.” He pushes Michael’s shirt up and grazes his hand over his stomach, the muscles predictably tense. The restless tone in Stan’s voice makes him think he’s not going to waste any time, and he mentally braces himself to keep it together for longer than five minutes, but once he gets his jeans unbuttoned his hand goes soft and slow, torturously slow. Like those sleepless-night jerk-off sessions he used to have as a teenager, Stan just rolling his hand around him, touching around his thighs, beneath his stomach. He feels his face buried in the back of his shoulder, breathing hard, clearly relishing this. “Fuck, Michael.”

“Stan.” He twists his head around, his breath already growing short. “Please.”  

“Please what?”

“God  _damn_  it Stan—” he leans back and grinds hard against his hips, seconds from berating him for being a total asshole, turning him into an incoherent mess with just a handful of words and some impassive touching. “I just want to come.”

“I knew that,” Stan says. Michael can see him grin to himself, in the corner of his eye. “I just wanted to hear you ask.”

He counts maybe half a dozen strokes before his eyes screw shut and he comes, shallowly, into his hand, feeling it slick along his stomach. The only noise he makes is a quiet choke into the pillow. Stan’s voice is somewhere far off, his hand rubbing along Michael’s back, encouraging: “That’s right. You’re alright.”

His mind is wiped clean. He feels his fingers probe along his stomach, wiping up the mess. Michael starts to get the idea that neither of them really know what they’re doing, that neither of them have any real control over what they want. He still opens his mouth when Stan brings his hand up to his lips. He still licks the come off his fingers without even thinking about it, really, not thinking about anything except that he’s in a crazy fucking dream and his neck has never felt this hot in his life.

Michael disentangles himself and turns around, and only then notices Stan’s touching himself—stroking with his left hand, rote and steady. It’s an inherently weird thing, watching your best friend jerk off in front of you, a dream-image he doesn’t think he can entirely comprehend while it’s happening. He doesn't speak, just lets Stan guide his hand down and kisses him, surprised by the roughness of his beard and how he pushes his mouth open with his tongue. When he finishes, Stan seems to crumble, his face dropping into Michael's shoulder. Then he says, almost whispers: “I don’t know why I did that.”

It doesn’t sound regretful; it’s almost kind of sad. Michael looks at him lying there on the quilt, still dressed, his body blocking out the lamplight.

“It’s okay,” Michael says, although that’s not the point. Suddenly he doesn’t feel like he should touch him, even though they’re inches apart. Stan notices this, maybe, and reaches up to touch his cheek, his hand draping over the back of his neck. “I mean. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t—”

Stan looks pained, like he’s poked at a particularly gaping wound neither of them wanted to acknowledge. “You’re okay,” he says. “Let’s just—we should just sleep.”

The second the light goes out Michael feels himself sink under, Stan clutching him disconcertingly tight. He wakes up at dawn on top of the covers, cotton-mouthed and freezing, to an empty house. When he leaves, he throws some of his clothes and papers into a bag, just in case.

* * *

He’s sitting alone at his work table, listening to tapes that the kids had left behind, until he finally forces himself to get his notebook out of his bag and look at his taglines. Everything on the page is embarrassing to read—he wonders how he could have written down such asinine sentences and been convinced they were fine.  _You’re losing your touch_ , says his voice in his head, as if someone can lose their touch writing the same way they can with a sewing needle.

He goes to the phone on the wall and dials the number of the hotel, scrawled down in the top corner of the page. After the switchboard connects him, it rings maybe ten or twelve times, and he’s just about to give up when he hears her, wary: “Hello?”

“Hey,” Michael says. “It’s not weird for me to call you up like this. Is it?”

There’s a lull on the other end—maybe she has to decide. “It’s not weird. Do you need something?”

“Yeah, actually.” He laughs. “I don’t know anything about clothes. I don’t even understand what would  _make_  a girl buy a two-hundred dollar dress.

“Um.” She hears the clunk of the receiver, switching from one shoulder to the other. “It’s such a personal decision, so it really has to be about her. You’ve been in a room full of men writing copy before—they get caught up with the imaginary woman in the picture and not the one buying it.”

“Okay. But  _why_  does she want it?”

“I don’t know. The last time I bought a dress just off the rack, it was because I just had an image of myself wearing it, and I liked it. It didn’t even matter that I had nothing to wear it to—I just liked the idea of being the kind of person who would wear it.”

It still makes no sense. “I don’t know why Don gave this project to me,” he says, eyeing the empty desks on the other side of the room. “There are girls who actually understand this kind of stuff.”

“Are they any good?” she asks.

“Sure.”

“Come on. It was his first big commission and he gave it to you. He trusts you.”

“Yeah.” He doesn't know how to reply. “I guess so.”

“It’s beautiful here,” she says, to fill the silence. “Have you heard from Stan?”

His chest thumps hard a few times, then sputters back to normal. “No. Why?”

“I haven’t either. He said he’d call once he got to Dover.”

His shoulders deflate, a little. He’d completely forgotten that Stan was supposed to leave the next morning. “I, um—I think he said he had some stuff to finish at work before he left.”

“Yeah.” She’s quiet for a second, the first sign of discomfort on the other line. “I should probably start getting ready for dinner. And, uh, see if Stan ever calls. But I’ll talk to you soon, okay?”

“Sure. I’ll talk to you soon.”

He hangs up first, staring at the dial. Then he calls the office and they put him through to Stan’s phone, but it rings and rings until someone picks up to tell him he’s not there. No one answers at home, either, so he sits there a while, groveling over his options, until he gives up and calls Don upstairs, despite the fact he hasn’t seen him the whole week. When the phone picks up, finally, someone else answers.

“Hello?” Michael asks.

“Oh, it’s you.”

“Is Don there?”

“No. Why?”

“I just—I really need to talk to him.”

“Does it have to do with work?”

“Um. No?”

“Then there’s no reason we can talk. Go get a cab—I’ll meet you down there.”

* * *

“So the old man’s out of town.” Roger squints at him from the other side of the dinner table, the vodka in his glass sloshing dangerously close to the rim. “Sorry you got stuck with me.”

“It’s alright.” Michael had gone out of his way not to ask why, exactly, he’d been in Don’s apartment, just as Roger had done him the service of not asking why he’d called in such a panic. Instead he’s focused on catching up to him. The booze can’t do much to settle his nerves, but the glass feels right in his hand—something he can grip onto without the fear of crushing it into pieces.

“He left on Monday morning,” Roger says, with patented disdain. “Californ-I-A. One of these days he’ll fly off there for the last time and never come back, you know.”

“I don’t get the appeal,” Michael says.

“See? Of course you don’t.” His face lights up. “You and me, we’re city kids, born and bred. We can achieve whatever we want without ever having to leave this place.”

“I thought you left here all the time,” he says. “Don’t you have a place in Long Island? And, like, France or something?”

“Sure I do, but that’s not the point—the point is I always come back.” Roger lifts his glass. “Cheers.” They toast again, for what feels like the millionth time, and Michael wonders if the food will ever show up.

“So if you don’t want to talk about it, kiddo, I won’t pry,” he says, after a spell. “But you didn’t sound like you just wanted to grab a couple drinks when you called.”

“Oh.” He clears his throat. “I guess not.”

“Anything on your mind?”

Michael sucks in his bottom lip and takes a moment, realizing he hadn’t even rehearsed what he wanted to say to Don. But he’s hotly aware of the drawn-out silence and the guilty look on his face, so he just has to go in dry and say something: “Um. It has to do with Peggy and Stan.”

Roger salvages his still-burning cigarette out of the little tin ashtray and puffs on it, staring at him intently (not exactly shocked, but not exactly judging.) “What happened?”

“The three of us are all really close. I mean, Stan is my best friend, and Peggy and I”—he winces automatically—“we’re close too. And so, um. The other night things got a little bit out of—”

“ _Ginsberg_.” He leans across the table, and Michael’s heart stops for a second until he understands the look on Roger’s face—somewhere between shocked and conspiratorial. “You sly dog. Believe it or not, Peggy’s a kept woman, and Stanley could kick your ass any day. You really decided to get in the middle of that?”

Michael stops, stuck between laughing in his face and possibly throwing up. He’s just glad he doesn’t impulsively correct him.

Roger’s about to say something else, but then the waiter brings Michael another sidecar (which had been ordered for him, to his mortification, after he’d stammered over the cocktail menu for several minutes) and he becomes distracted. “That looks fantastic—comes in a lovely glass, too. You know that the coupe was modeled on Joséphine’s breast? People will  _tell_  you it’s Marie Antoinette’s, but that actually came later.”

When the waiter leaves, Michael leans forward and asks: “So, um. You think she’s going to tell him?”

Roger scoffs. “Of  _course_  she’ll tell him. There’s no secrets between those two. You’ve seen them.”

Michael looks down into his glass and takes a drink. It really is delicious—the rim is coated in sugar, and if it weren’t for the cognac it would taste just like lemonade.

“Listen, I’m going to be straight with you, because I’m almost sixty years old and don’t have time to feed anyone any more bullshit. It’s why I retired.” Roger pushes his glass away and stares him down. “You can only do the ‘poor adulterer’ bit for so long, because you both knew exactly what you were doing. Nothing ever just  _happens_ —you know that, and Stan knows that.”

The last part makes his hair stand up a little, but he nods, more vigorously than he needs to. The lemon and sugar starts to cut into the split in his lip. Finally Michael says, in an attempt to be lighthearted: “So you’ve wrecked a marriage or two before, huh?”

“Oh, kid. I’ve wrecked at least three marriages.” He snorts under his breath. “Sorry. Nothing funny about it at all. It’s a shitty feeling, isn’t it?”

Before he can answer, their plates arrive and Michael starts eating, suddenly ravenous and very tipsy. Dinner always tasted better when he wasn’t paying for it, sure, but Michael could actually envision himself spending money to be here. There was something comforting in its mustiness, all the photo-lined walls and red velvet that blocked out any light. And everyone there was dressed well except him; for the first time, he’s self-conscious of his hand-me-down shirt and corduroy jacket with the single patched-up elbow.

“I told Don his first wife was having an affair to his face,” Roger says, watching Michael scarf down his food with alien fascination. “I thought he  _knew_  , or at least saw it coming. I mean, the guy chased so much tail then that she must have been bored, not to mention no one was raising those kids but her. And I  _never_ thought he should have married that twenty-year-old”—he stops himself, reaching into his jacket for more smokes—“Christ. Sorry. We’re supposed to be talking about you.”

“It’s okay,” Michael says. “I don’t need to talk about it. I can figure it out myself.”

“No you can’t.” He laughs out loud this time. “This is quite literally the only area of expertise I can help you in. And I’ll feel guilty if I don’t.”

Michael shrugs. He  _is_ buying his dinner. “Fine. What am I supposed to do?”

“Well, you know you can’t go back. But you must have guessed that already.” Roger points to the folio stuffed with work that Michael had been carrying around, laying on the booth next to his lap. “If Peggy’s gone, you don’t know what he’ll do.”

He’s not wrong—he doesn’t know. Michael thinks of his clothes in the milkcrates and all his new records. In his head, he’d already come to terms with leaving them behind.

“Okay. What else?”

* * *

“That’s the other thing,” Roger says, as Michael helps dangle him back onto Don’s couch. “Let me give you the name of my tailor. Crazy old Neapolitan prick, but I love him. He’ll get you fixed up. God forbid someone invites you to Barbetta and you wander in dressed like a goddamn vagrant.”

“Do I dress like a vagrant?”

He squints at him. “No.”

Michael checks his watch. It’s only ten o’clock in California. “Are you going to sleep?”

“I guess. Where are you going?”

Michael looks at the door, then remembers Roger knows he has nowhere to go. “Just to the studio to get some work done. I’ll be back, probably.”

“Mikey boy,” he hears him half-sing down the hall. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

Downstairs, he dumps his papers out onto his desk and stands over it, shuffling them around to make sense of all his notes. It’s only a few lines of finished copy, then scribbled-out paragraphs and still lifes he’d done to put off writing more ideas. There’s one of the telephone in front of him done in careful red pen, the perspective just slightly off. He sits down and dials the hotel number again.

“It’s Michael,” he says, once she answers the phone. His own voice is unrecognizable. “What’s going on?”

“What’s going on,” she throws back at him. “Nothing. I just got back from dinner. What are you up to? It’s late over there.”

“Roger took me out drinking, by the office. It was bizarre.”

“What?” She starts laughing, which makes him realize just  _how_  bizarre it all really was. “What was he even doing there?”

“I don’t know. I think he might be living with Don.”

“What the fuck?”

“There’s a ton of his stuff just like, strewn on the floor. I didn’t ask.”

“God.” He hears her lighting a cigarette. “I’m getting lunch with Don tomorrow. Maybe if I grill him he’ll talk.”

“Peggy?” he asks, after a second.

“What is it?”

“I still believe what I told you, you know. However long ago it was.”

There’s a long beat, and then she seems to realize. “That’s okay. It doesn’t matter where you’re from. I know you’re—a really special person.”

“Not that. I love you. I’ve always been in love with you. I’ve just been looking for the time and place.”

“Michael,” she says, and he waits breathlessly, until he hears her sigh and realizes he’s made a severe misstep. “I—listen, I’m sorry. I can’t do this right now.”

“Right. Um, I get it. I completely understand. Sorry.” And he flings the receiver down before he can hear her reply.

Roger’s not asleep when he comes back upstairs. “Take the bed,” he tells Michael, pointing him to the unmade mattress in the corner of the studio. “Don won’t care. Really.”

He’s in no position to turn it down. He takes off his shoes and belt and coat and smooths out the sheets, getting on top of them. Then he pulls the blanket almost up to his chin.

“It’s hard when someone you love just can’t do it,” Roger says. Michael raises his head, but then he sees Roger isn’t even looking at him. “I fucking  _love_ Don. But he’s a complete narcissist. I don’t think he can love anyone. He doesn’t even understand what it means, or what it involves. You know?”

“Yeah.” Michael doesn’t know what else to say, so he settles on nothing at all, and not long after he’s fast asleep.  

* * *

“So how’s retirement, really?” Don asks, once the three of them wander out of the restaurant. It’s a cool evening, and his visit has been far from the fantasy he’d had of sitting on the beach doing nothing—he’s mostly been driving around, down to San Diego and almost Mexico, before he had to turn back.

“If you could call it that.” He’s being modest, but Freddy’s never looked better—it was as if California had sanded all the edges off him. He’s got on blue jeans and loafers, which Don usually never sees on anyone over the age of thirty. But everyone dresses like that here. “I write so many recommendations at this point, I’m my own firm.”

“You’d stop if you wanted to,” says Peggy. The three of them have gotten on like a house on fire, despite the fact it’s been a dry dinner and she doesn’t remember the last time the three of them were together when one of them wasn’t in a spiral. (Now it was _her_ turn, but of course she couldn’t even talk about it. She’d kept on a pleasant face and focused on keeping up the conversation.)

“I’ll get the car,” she says, taking Don’s valet ticket, despite the fact she really just wants to go out for a smoke by herself. She slips through the open door and leaves the men in the breezeway.

“You didn’t sound like you were doing well when you called,” Freddy says, when they’re alone.

“I’m not.”  

“Have you been going to meetings back home?”

He shakes his head. “I don’t know, there’s just—something about it. I don’t want to be seen there.”

“Don.” This is the part he hates—his unbearable kindness, the way he nudges him into looking at things frankly. “It’s for your own benefit, not to shame you. You need to be around people who know what you’re going through.”

“I know.”

“I’m still your sponsor, you know. Give me a call every once in a while.” He gives him a slug on the shoulder. “But I know you. You’re gonna pull through.”

* * *

“You’re not drinking anymore,” Peggy says to him—she knows it’s true, but she phrases it as a question anyway, just in case.

“No,” he says. “Don’t let that stop you.” The hotel room has a fridge and tiny bar, which is completely novel to her. It’s the kind of place that you have to call for them to send up ice, so she forgoes it and pours herself straight scotch. (This was almost the only way she and Don spent time together anymore, and she was sick of waitstaff getting the wrong idea.) 

“So,” Don asks, once she sits down with her drink, “have you had fun?”

“Come on,” she laughs, “you already know the answer to that question. The shoot went  _fine_.”

He looks proud, almost glowing. “You’ve come a long way.”  

“I’ve been doing this sixteen years and they’re  _just_ now noticing who I am.”

“You just have to keep pedaling. In the next five years, the generation above you is going to run out of ideas, and die out.” It makes her snort, but she knows he’s probably right. “Then by the eighties you’ll be at the top.”

“That’s so long from now,” she sighs—she knows it’s naïve of her, of course, and that it would be there before she could even notice. “And the last time I had fun was maybe, I don’t know, 1966.”

“Great year,” Don mumbles, to himself.

“Yeah,” she says, laying back. That time did always stick out in her head. It was the first time she started getting real work, on her own. She’d had Abe, back when someone who just paid attention to her was exciting; her mother had been amiable to him, back when she was worried about that sort of thing. In a way, she missed that time and that lack of responsibility, when she’d just gotten ahold of herself and felt more reckless about love. Everything else before and after had been so traumatic.

Seconds after she catches herself closing her eyes, the phone starts ringing. Don answers it swiftly—hand over the receiver, he announces to her: “It’s Roger.”

She only hears Don’s half of the conversation—there are long stretches of silence, though, probably just Roger unloading on him. She plays with the gold engraved lighter on the table, striking the flint and snapping the cover shut over the flame.

Then, eventually, she realizes Don’s turned around from where he’d had her back to her, and he’s looking right at her with an unidentifiable expression. For a second, she thinks she’s done something to annoy him—maybe the sound of the lighter. But then he turns around, mumbling something into the phone, and listens quietly for a few more minutes before he hangs up.

“Stan said he’d call tonight,” she says to no one in particular, and Don checks his watch, glancing to the door.

“Maybe you should be there when he does,” he says, standing up.

“That’s probably a good idea.” She sits up to slip her shoes back on, finishing off what’s left of her drink.

“The front desk can get you a cab.”

“You’re kinda rushing me out. Do you have a girl coming over, or something?”

“What? No.” He looks at her like he’s offended she'd even suggest such a thing. “I have to leave early tomorrow.”

“Right, right.” She pulls on her coat and purse and steps out into the hall. “See you.”

“See you.” He closes the door behind him and leaves her there, tipsy and waiting for the elevator.

* * *

When Don gets home Sunday morning and unlocks the studio, someone is curled up asleep on the couch. For a second he's sure a drifter broke in overnight. Then they raise their head and he realizes it’s only Michael.

“Sorry,” he groans. He looks like he's been there for days. Don notices he’s covered up with what he’s pretty sure is his blanket.

“What are you doing here?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“I know what happened,” he says, flatly.

“No you don’t.”

Don moves to the couch to stand over him, and he feels an uncomfortable pang of recognition—like checking on a child with the flu. “Roger can’t keep a secret.” He sits down on the coffee table across from him. “I thought Peggy was happy. But if you two—”

“It wasn’t Peggy,” Michael blurts, “alright?”  

“Oh.”  _Oh._ Neither of them can bear to look at the other. Instead Don looks at the handle of cheap vodka sitting on the floor. “That’s different.”

“I can’t write copy for you anymore,” he says. “I’m sorry. I know you just gave me a job because you felt sorry for me.”

“That’s not true.”

“It is. Somebody better help poor crazy fucking Michael Ginsberg before he hurts himself. Or someone else. I’ve  _heard_ it before, you rich prick.”

He reaches out blindly for the bottle, but Don beats him to it. “Easy. It’s one in the afternoon.”

“I have ideas, I really do,” he mumbles. “There's this new music, and it's great. And pretty soon people like you are going to start buying and selling it back to people. But—I already found it. I want to be first. I have  _vision_." 

Something about it catches Don off guard. He almost feels proud. 

“I'm fired anyway," Michael says, “aren't I? I just called you a prick.”

“No. I’ll give the account to Lynette. You can stop writing copy.” He glances at him, then to the equipment in the corner. “Do you know how to work a video camera?”

“No.”  

“Can you sleep it off and then figure out how?”

He just nods, facedown in the cushion. When Don is on his way out, closing the blinds, he hears him mumble: “I’m sorry about everything that happened to you. Roger wouldn’t shut up about it. He’s really in love with you, man, it’s sad.”

* * *

“What did you tell him?” Don opens the bottle and pours the rest of it down the sink, trying not to breathe through his nose.

“Who?” Roger’s sprawled on the end of the bed, in his shirtsleeves. “Mike?”

“What did you  _tell_ him?”

“Nothing,” he snaps. “I told him the story with Betty. I mean, give me a break, I talked about  _Mona_ , too. I was just trying to make him feel better. Kid's had a rough go of it—he needs some kind of example, someone to look up to, okay?”

“You just can’t help yourself, can you?” Don says. “You have to run your mouth and rewrite history.”

“God.” Roger covers his face with his arm, trying not to laugh. “I’m sorry.”

“For which part?”

“I’m sorry I wrecked your marriage,” he wheezes.

“ _Both_  marriages.”

“You’re right. That’s four I’ve wrecked.” He slides down to the floor, wiping his eyes, his face grinning and bright red. “Not including my own! Christ.”

Don walks over and stands over him, briefly, until he kneels down and sits on the floor. “We’ve both made a lot of mistakes.”

“Yeah, no shit.” Roger’s still laughing. “I keep coming back to the same mistakes over and over again, just chasing the same thing. But I can’t have it.”

“What’s that?”

“You. Isn’t that obvious?” He doesn’t look at him. “You’ve never been with a man. You’re clearly nauseated at the thought of it.”

“That's what this is about.” Don turns his head from where they’re both sitting, leaning against the bed. Then, impulsively, he reaches out and loops his hand in Roger’s collar, pulling him in close, toppling every boundary he’d set. His hand loops around his wrist. “Is this what you want?”

Roger looks at him, inches away from his face, and then scoffs. “No. Use your words, Don. Jesus.” He pushes him off and stands up, searching for his cufflinks. “I’m getting out of here.”

“You don't have to leave," he says, helplessly.

“Relax, I'm not  _leaving._  I'm just leaving for a while because I'm fucking annoyed with you.”

“Oh." The gravity of the situation seems to dissipate. “What's with the language? You're spending too much time with Ginsberg." 

“You'd like the guy if you got to know him," Roger says, standing up to pull on his coat. “I have this theory that you, me, and him are exactly the same, except we've been to therapy and you haven't.”

“What makes you think I haven't been to therapy?” Don asks. 

Halfway out the door, Roger seems to almost say something, but then stops himself. “No. Nope. I'm still angry. Goodbye.”  

* * *

He puts music on to drown out his bruising headache, and starts to clean up the mess. The manuals for the camera and the tape recorder are both incomprehensible, but he can at least figure out how to point and shoot, and that's enough to get his mind going. Don comes in and out, pacing around, although he gets the feeling it's just to check on him. Late in the afternoon, when he's alone, he hears the distinct sound of someone jiggling the door handle open. He gets a gut feeling, and before he can try to rationalize it, he proves himself right.

“You’re supposed to be in Massachusetts,” Michael says, vacantly. “Your mother’s birthday.”

“Fuck her.” He’s holding a paper bag under his arm. “I brought your pills. You left them.”

“Oh.” Right. His pills, which he hadn’t touched in days. Michael watches him set the bag on the table, next to his typewriter and the dozens of empty paper coffee cups.

“Listen,” Stan says. He manages to look at him for a few seconds. “What happened was irresponsible of me, and crazy. And I don’t know what I’m supposed to do to make it  _un_ -happen, but—”

“You can't. You can't make things un-happen. What are you going to tell Peggy?”

He wrinkles his nose. “What am I supposed to do, lie?”

“I guess not.”

“You don’t have to go,” Stan says, the edge in his voice rising. “Don’t go.”

“I have to.” Michael starts fumbling with the blank reel like he knows what he’s supposed to do with it. “I can’t live with you two anymore. It’s—not right. It’s never been right.”

“Let me at least bring you your stuff. You’re going to find another place, right?”

“Stan, no.” Michael stares at him, with his colorful clothes and shaggy hair, finally starting to show his age. He feels like he’s standing in an oven; like just breathing in would cook him alive, but he does it anyway, steeling himself: “I don’t want your help. I don’t want to see you.”

“Okay,” he says, like it’s not even a big deal; like he can’t recognize the seriousness of the statement. “You know where to find me.”

Stan waits there, probably hoping those aren’t the last words he says to him. He can’t watch him leave.

* * *

The next day, she finally gets that call, while she's packing her suitcase the afternoon before she gets on the red-eye home. He greets her calmly, and when he ignores her questions she just gives up and exclaims: “What the fuck is going on, Stan?”

She hears him wince. “I don’t think we should talk about it on the phone.” 

“Come on. I know you’re not in Massachusetts—I can hear the office. Don started acting really weird when I mentioned you. And Michael called me the other night in tears. What is happening?”

“Peg,” he sighs, and she only realizes he’s serious when he says her name like that. She’d  _had_ a feeling something would go wrong, she was certain of it, and she'd gone and ignored it anyway.

“Okay, fine. Is Michael there? I think I need to apologize.”

“Michael’s gone,” he says. “I don’t know where he is.”

“Okay.” She waits a second, only to be met with silence on the other line. “Love you.”

“Yeah.” He hangs up before her.

* * *

It’s getting late, and Don is about to politely ask Michael to at least go home for the night when someone starts pounding at the warehouse door. When he peers through the crack, it’s not who he expects—it’s Mona, of all people. And of course, Roger, with his arm slung around her shoulder. Don greets them both coolly.

“I found this one drunk outside my apartment at three in the afternoon,” Mona says, with her classic detached breeziness, as if she’d come across a kitten instead of her ex-husband. “Is this really where you’re living?”

“Upstairs.” Don reaches into his pocket, fishing out the key to the apartment. He puts it in Roger’s outstretched hand, and in an excruciating moment, he watches him thank Mona, kiss her on the cheek, and exit through the side door. 

“Mona, I’m sorry—”

“No, that’s all right.” She starts buttoning up her black coat and fur collar up to the neck, making a point to not remove her gloves or put down her bag. “I wasn’t brought against my will. I thought I’d better come along to at least see the place.”  

“Well?” They both look around the studio. He doesn’t have much to show for himself—just full ashtrays and cluttered desks, and Michael stumbling around with the camera balanced on his shoulder. Just then, Don notices that the walls are bare between the massive windows; no one's bothered to put up art or awards or any indication people  _create_ here. Blocks away, a car alarm starts to blare.

“Well,” she says, “I’ve seen it.”

Then he sees Michael has turned around to stare at the two of them, the camera pointing down. He realizes he’s been caught and waves awkwardly. “Sorry, Don. I’ll get out of here so you can talk to Mrs., um—”

“Mona.” She lifts her chin and seems to brighten her face in lieu of actually smiling. “Roger’s first wife.”

“This is Michael Ginsberg,” Don says, ushering him over, “our new art director.”

“Great meeting you,” he says, and shakes her hand—she looks uncomfortable, maybe because of the hours-old liquor on his breath or the unruly state of his hair. “Uh, I’d really better be on my way.”

“Yes, go home,” Don says. “Great work today.”

When they're alone, Mona's expression drops, and she turns back to Don. “If I told him he’d be living rent-free under your roof ten years ago, he’d have laughed in my face.”

“It’s not permanent; it’s just until he gets himself together. The holidays are lonely.”

She raises a brow. “I’m not an idiot, Don.”

“I know you’re not,” he blurts, like that means anything. “And I know you’ve never been able to stand me because you think I’m a threat to Roger. But it's just not the same anymore—”

“No, I think Roger’s a threat to  _you_.” She gives him a look that's familiar by now: searing, understanding some truth that he simply can't. “It’s always been the same with you two. The only difference now is there's nothing standing in the way. Have you ever considered what  _I_ think? What your daughters might think?” 

“Does Margaret know?” he asks. 

“Margaret's gone. She hasn't spoken to either of us in years. You don't even know about that?”

“He didn't tell me.” 

“That wouldn't be like him.” She rolls her eyes. “So that's not your fault.”

“I'm sorry,” he says.

Mona cuts her eyes away. “I'm sorry, too.”

“You know I'll do anything I can for you, and your family,” Don says, trying to sound genuine and not effacing. He's still not good at it, even when he means it. “Whatever you need. I've always cared about you, Mona.”

“Enough, Don,” she says. “If you care so much, walk me outside. The driver’s circling.”

* * *

With his suitcase and folio under his arm, he walks to the subway station, and takes the 4 almost all the way down to the end, surfacing on Flatbush Avenue. Then he walks until he ends up at the same familiar row of apartments in a teeming, quiet neighborhood. Just when he thinks he’s going to have to spend the night in the stairwell, Morris opens the door, peering through the crack. He’s wearing the same light green dress shirt he seemed to have had on for the entirety of his childhood. The pocket with all the little holes from cigarette ashes looks as if it’s been replaced.

“Something told me you'd be back,” he says. 

“I’m sorry, Pops.”

“For what?” He reaches out to take his bag, and Michael follows him inside.

 

 

 

**epilogue: may 14th-june 1st 1979**

The records are still where he left them, leaning against the books on the bottom shelf. Stan wipes some of the dust off with his sleeve and flips through them.

He’d gone in with Michael to a music store once, and he’d never liked the way he grabbed for the first things he saw, or only the names he’d heard on the radio: the Hollies, The Carpenters,  _Rubber Soul_. Stan had teased him about his taste before—for someone who claimed to hate treacly bullshit, he clearly had a soft spot for love songs, especially the ones that jumped from major to minor, designed to twist up your emotions.  

Sentimentality used to scare him, even in songs. Now he couldn’t stop thinking about why he’d ever acted like his taste bothered him, like it’d even mattered at all. He didn't think it was possible for a place to be haunted by things he'd done; like how whenever he stood in Peggy's office he could sometimes feel the ghost of his heart in his throat or his arms around her for the first time. For over a year he couldn't even go up into the attic, until he finally broke down. His excuse was that he'd already ruined the floors in the living room and cluttered the space with his projects, and that it was getting in the way of what they shared together. But in the back of his head, it was an odd kind of self-punishment, being forced to remember every time he climbed up the stairs. He hasn't folded the murphy bed back up—there's too much stuff on it and nowhere for it to go—and so he always sees it in his periphery, always feels a set of imaginary eyes boring through the back of his head. 

But he only really thinks that way when he's sober. He puts on a record, lights the joint in his mouth, and goes to carry the last easel upstairs. 

* * *

“I can’t see her,” he says, like he really has the last word on the matter. Don realizes then, staring down at the papers on his desk, that this is far from the first time a man had outright refused to speak to Peggy Olson. “You already know what happened.”

“Michael, you’re being a child. She told me she _wants_ to see you. And her contacts could actually help you.”

“Why would she want to see me, after everything?” Neither of them had acknowledged what, exactly, had happened, but it hung heavy and unspoken in the air.

“Listen. _Peggy_ gave you this job,” Don says. “Not me. She told me to kick you any work I had, even before she knew I was starting this. She even told me where to find you.”

He flinches. “Jesus. Really?”

“I wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t think you were talented. But she’s always been the one in your corner. Just take what she gives you.” 

* * *

He takes the bus into Midtown, but gets off about ten blocks too early and has to wander up and down Madison until he finds it. It’s a weird feeling, having to get to her through her secretary (even though she’s very nice, and offers him coffee.) Peggy is at the door when he shows up, and she greets him with a hug, like nothing’s changed between them. To his own fumbling, she doesn’t let him into his office, even to glance inside. She's carrying her coat and bag over her arm. “Why don’t we go for a walk? I’m ready to get out of here.”

It doesn't sound all too bad, so he follows her. “It’s good to see you,” she says, once they step into the elevator. “You look well.”

“Thanks.” He bites his lip, then: “Where’s Stan? Or how is he, rather?”

“He’s good,” she says. “He left McCann about a year ago. He’s sort of between work, but—right now he’s helping paint sets for this theater thing, just to get out of the house.”

“Oh, yeah?” He smiles, unsure how to take the news. “What theater?”

“Circle Repertory. Have you heard of it?”

“Of course.” Of course he was working for the _only_ theater company he’d heard of.

“Yeah, it’s been interesting.” They make it out onto the sidewalk, walking abreast; Peggy catches him looking, and smiles. “So—I won’t lie, I’m happy to help however I can. But I mostly just wanted to see you, not talk about business. Do you want to just come over for dinner?”

“Um, sure.” He blinks. It sounds pleasant, in the abstract. “I mean, I’d like that.”

So he follows her down several blocks, then into a cab to the same brownstone, up the same stairs, into their living room. Of course, the first thing he notices is that the ladder is still down. Peggy doesn’t seem to pay it any mind until she catches him staring.

“Oh.” She eyes the ceiling. “Yeah, we decided to just turn that into a miscellaneous space. Stan uses it for oil painting.”

“May I?”

“Sure.”

He climbs up the stairs. The space is much smaller and darker than he remembered, and harder to navigate with the mess of easels and painting supplies.

“Stan hides his pot up here, too,” she says, with a little smile, “if you're interested.”

“I’m good.” They both find a place to sit—Michael by the desk, Peggy on one of the crates. It feels oddly formal, like they've just prepared a pitch, and they both laugh through the discomfort. 

“How  _are_ you?” she asks.

“I’m okay.” He really is, for once, so he hopes she knows he means it. "I'm finally, you know, doing stuff I might be good at."

“Like what?”

“Like—I'm supervising music, now, whatever that is. There's a shoot next week with this band I found; we're just going to tape them playing. It's technically for a TV spot, but if it  _works_ , we might start producing them, see if local channels will pick them up.” 

“That’s amazing,” she says. “You’re way ahead of the curve, you know. I wish I was doing stuff as new as this.”

“You’re doing important stuff, too.”

“I suppose so.”

“How are you and Stan doing?” Maybe that’s the wrong question, but she handles it well.

“Stan’s fine. It’s not that what happened didn’t throw a wrench in things, because it did. But I wasn’t angry at him. Or you.”

“I don’t believe that,” Michael says.

She looks at him, then rolls her eyes. “I was pretty angry. But I understand how it happened. And—if I’ve learned anything, it’s that things change so quickly.”

“But things are alright between you two.”

She nods, but that obviously isn’t all there is to it. “I think he wishes he’d gotten to have kids.”

“And you don’t?”

“Well—” she's holding back, for reasons he can't grasp. “Maybe I should just show you.” She stands up and goes to the desk, pulling an open envelope out of the top drawer. The letter is tri-folded and neatly typed, with a piece of notebook paper stapled to the back. She holds it out to him, but he doesn’t touch it.

“It’s from my son. He wants to meet me.”

Without thinking, he blurts: “I didn’t know you had a son.”

“Technically I don’t,” she says. “I’ve never seen him. He just turned eighteen.”

He looks at the paper from upside down. It’s from a Catholic adoption agency—the letterhead has a drawing of Mary in profile, with boilerplate information and a handwritten letter attached.

“I thought it was harder to find your own mother than that.” He could remember plenty of people he know, from school to hospital, who’d agonized over the New York state department of social services.

“It wasn’t exactly a secret,” Peggy says. “Both the parents had to sign off before he could even send it to me.”

“What’s his name?”

“Thomas.” She shrugs, as if to say _I didn't pick it_.

They both sit there a moment, staring down at the paper in her lap. Finally Michael says: “Well, you have to see him, right?”

When he meets her gaze, he notices she looks tired, almost withered. He can’t remember the last time he saw her like that. Maybe it was never.

“I’m not the person he needs me to be,” she says. “He’s probably expecting this—good Catholic girl who just made a mistake before she started a _real_ family.”

“I would give anything to have met my mother. I don’t care who she is, she’s my  _mother_.”

She recoils a little, like he’s offended her personally. “You know that's not the same.”

“It is too.” He knows he’s being petulant, but the stakes are suddenly low again. “He has to have prepared himself for someone much worse.”

“I don’t know, okay? I still need to decide.”

“Sorry.” He stands up, just to give her space, and wanders over to the bed, in the same place by the window. It’s still pulled down and neatly made, empty except for stacks of extra blankets and pillows. For whatever reason, she follows him, and when she sits down there's a heady silence, to the point where he flinches when she finally talks. 

“It happened here,” Peggy says. “Right?” She’s looking at him in a way that makes it impossible for him to do anything but nod. 

She doesn't react the way he expects. “He misses you. A lot.” It sounds hard for her to say. “ _I_  miss you.”

“Me too,” he says. 

He’s sure nothing is going to happen—this is another of those fake-out moments, where one of them will back off and everything will go back to normal. He's still actively thinking that way even as she puts her hands on him, when his vision shifts and he can only see her, what's left of the sunlight stretching from the window over her face, until it disappears. 

When they kiss, all he can focus on is how weirdly soft it feels, how gentle she is even when she pushes him back, guiding his hand to her breast. Perfume fills his head. She pulls away, looking for some kind of wordless approval in his face, but it’s not there. So she just clutches his head to her shoulder and listens to him breathe. He’s terribly quiet, except for the reedy whistle at the top of his inhale and exhale.

“I’m sorry.” She strokes his hair. He stays still. “I really am.”

“It’s okay.” Michael stays there a few exhales longer, then lifts his head up from her shoulder. “I should go.” He goes for his camera and coat, sitting on the desk.

“What about dinner?” (As if that was ever going to happen.) 

“Another time.”

“Where do you live now?” she asks, to make small talk.

“Brooklyn. I’m saving up.”

“You’ll be back in the city before you know it,” she says.

He shakes his head. “I’m saving up to leave.”

“Leave to go  _where_?”

“I don’t know. Probably California.”

She scoffs, to his dismay. “You’ve lived here your whole life. You really want to give it up for California?”  

“People act like being from here is some big deal,” he interjects. “I have no attachment to this place. I've never  _not_ wanted to leave, in fact.”

“Do you even know how to drive a car?”

“Of course I don’t.”

“I just don’t get what’s  _there_  that you can’t have here,” she says, after a pause.

“I have no expectations.” He turns to the mirror and adjusts his jacket a little. “I just want to be somewhere else. That's all.”

Once Michael's downstairs, the panic starts to actually creep in. He’s about to open the door and let himself out, before he hears Peggy say his name.

“Um. I have something for you, actually.” She hands him a box from the living room table. “I was on the Sony account at McCann, and they gave these out to us at the end. I figured you’d get more use out of it than me.”

He takes the box and looks down at it—it’s brand new, still in the plastic.  _Walking Stereo with Hotline_  is printed on the eggshell-blue background, and below in looping red letters it says  _WALKMAN._

“Thanks.”

“Sure.”

* * *

“And then what?” Stan’s sitting there on the end of the bed, staring up at her with his hands in his lap.

“Nothing else happened,” she says. “It all got out of control really fast, but that was it.”

He nods. “It’s okay. I get it.”

“Do you trust me?” she asks, standing over him. 

“Of course.”  

“He said he missed you.”

“He did?”

“Sort of. I told him you missed him and he said ‘me too.’”  

He reaches up and tucks the hair behind her ear. “I love you.” Then he reaches for the phone on the bedside table, dialing the number written on her notepad.

They sit there, arms around each other, while they listen through the receiver. “This is weird, isn’t it?” Stan asks. “Normal people don’t act like this.”

“It’s _definitely_ weird.” Peggy almost laughs, but she doesn’t want to be mean. “But I’m sick of wondering.”

Before he can say anything else, he picks up. He sounds polite, distracted: “Yeah?”

“It’s me,” Stan says. “Do you want to get a coffee or something?”

* * *

“Will you be coming back late again?” Melanie asks, on his way out to lunch.

“Give the kid a break,” Roger says, waving his newspaper towards her. He’s sprawled in one of the chairs in the front lobby—if you could even really call it that, since it was just a desk and some plants in front of a partition. “He’s got work to attend to.”

“I have a meeting,” Michael says. “Station producer.”

“Don’t forget our lunch, Don,” he shouts, across the room, before he flings the sports section onto the empty chair and starts on a new page. They don’t even try to keep it a secret anymore, Michael observes. They’re not strolling out arm-in-arm or anything, sure, but they do everything together, and he’s familiar with what it looks like when Don is close with someone—lots of dodging, lots of denying the undeniable.

As for Roger, he’s never technically _worked_ there, but he’s around all the time. Every few months he whisks Michael off to dinner and drinks somewhere. (He and Morris get along bewilderingly well, but only because Roger listens to his stories and inserts the right dry remark at the right time. And he must get some paternal joy when he watches Michael fight with Roger over covering the check and loses every time.)

Don appears behind the front desk, glancing over shoulders. “She’s right. Don’t be too late.”

“I won’t.” The bells on the door clang together as he opens it.

* * *

The first thing he notices about him, as if there isn’t already a lot to take in, is that he dresses much better than him. They meet outside a coffeehouse blocks away from the theater, and he can recognize him from some distance. He’s dressed in a brown-and-red tweed, perfectly cut, and a thin tie—he looks more like an artist than some veteran ad-man. Stan looks down at his Western shirt and blue jeans and realizes any attempt he’s made to look bohemian in the last ten years has been completely bogus.

“That’s a great suit,” he says, instead of an actual greeting. Suddenly Stan remembers that awful hug outside of the hospital, how bony he’d felt.

“Thanks,” he says. “It’s new.”

“You got Peggy’s gift,” he says, pointing to the Walkman in his shirt pocket.

“Yeah, it’s pretty cool.”

“It’s probably overkill, but I got you this, too.” Stan reaches into his coat and hands him a cassette. The cover art is bright and manic, of a face made out of shapes and scrawled letters: _XTC_.

“Oh, I like them,” Michael says, his face lighting up. “I tried calling their management, to see if they’d come here to shoot if they ever came from England. But I did that with about a million other bands, too, and they’ve either said no or hung up.”

“That’s too bad.”

“It’s whatever. If this project doesn’t work out, I’ll find something else.” He shrugs. “What have you been doing?”

“Painting for this _Hamlet_ production. Going home, watching TV, painting more. Sometimes I scrape together dinner.”

“You’re not bored?” Michael asks.

“Nah. I’ve been busy.” Stan looks down into his coffee. “I mean, it’s been lonely sometimes.”

“Yeah.” It’s quiet for a long while, so Michael finally decides to broach the subject: “So I guess you’re only here because Peggy told you.”

“I wanted to talk to you.” The look in Stan’s eyes is harsh, almost scolding, and Michael feels all his bottled replies dry up. “I mean, of course I know—we don’t keep secrets. But I’m not upset. I think that we could—”

“Yeah, I know we could,” he says, frustration accidentally climbing into his voice. “Things just have to be _different_ between us. The way we were, the three of us, it was like you were my parents or something.”

“What?”

“I know, I know. Freud would have a goddamn field day. But it felt like you'd set up this whole _life_ for me, and I can’t work under that kind of pressure.”

“Obviously that’s not what we were going for,” Stan says. “But I can be—whatever you want. If you’d have me.”

“Don’t say it like that. This is fucking weird enough.” He snorts, looking away, watching pigeons huddled in the grass. “But yes, of course I would. You don’t have to be anything.”

“Good.” They sit there a moment, then Stan reads his expression and frowns. “But?”

“I need more time.”

“Well, take as much as you need.” Stan looks disappointed, but he does a fair job hiding it. Even though he’s nowhere near done with his coffee, he stands up and shakes his hand. It’s strangely formal—probably to avoid any funny looks—except for how he reaches over and pats his elbow. “We’re not going anywhere.”

“That’s kind of depressing, when you put it like that.” Michael buttons his jacket, starting to realize that it’s far too warm for the middle of May.  

“Don’t wait too long,” Stan says. “I mean—it’s just good to _see_ you again, man. I was afraid it was going to take another decade.”

“It won’t be that long,” he laughs, although he knows it’s not exactly out of character.

* * *

“Do you know how much money we can make off this? If we get ahead of the television studios, people will start coming to us. Then we can partner with distributors.”

They’re in one of those notoriously long evening meetings, and the mood has gotten tense. He’s spent the last month making cold calls to record companies and TV stations, filling pages on his Rolodex late into the evening. During shoots he’ll haggle phone numbers from anyone who’ll talk to him, and he sets up half a dozen shady lunch meetings with whoever will listen. But he hasn’t exactly reinvented the wheel, or invented the lightbulb, or any other analogy he can think of. He's just noticed a trend on the rise, far beyond his purview, as much as he fantasized differently. 

And really, he knows this whole game isn’t for him. But the only way out he was familiar with was self-implosion.

“It’s all going to be syndicated, anyway. It’s just not going to work,” Don says. “Can we move on?”

Without warning, he snaps: “No! Jesus Christ. None of you get it.” Maybe not _all_ of them—he tries not to make eye contact with Melanie, or the people he’d tentatively made friends with in the art department, or any of the other bridges he’s about to burn. “There’s a new decade, people. You’re all ten years behind.”

“What are you talking about? All we’ve been working on is _your_ vision.”

“You’re full of shit, Don.” Michael practically rips his coat from the hook. As he’s yanking it on, his elbow swings back and accidentally knocks a mug of pens over. They clatter all over the floor—he fumbles a bit, but stops himself from picking them up. “You lie all the goddamn time. You only held onto me because you were obligated to.”

“Michael, wait.” Don follows him through the office, out the front door. “Come back inside, for God’s sake. We can talk about this.”

“What are you doing in this neighborhood, anyway? You’re what, fifty and living around these twenty-year-old kids, trying to be all— you’re not my father, alright?”  

“No one’s anyone’s father.” Michael swears he can see the last bit of empathy just drop from his face, and he realizes he’s locked himself out. “I was trying to help.”

“You only wanted to help until I started having my own ideas.”

“Come on. You’ll get your break someday. We’re finally getting the board together—don’t you want to be made a partner?”

“No, I don’t want to be made a partner.” Michael scoffs, knowing there’s no way he would have turned it down even months ago. “I want to start my career. Not follow you around for the rest of my natural life.”

“What do you think _you_ have that we don’t?” Don asks, his voice gone cold. “You’re not going anywhere. You dug your own grave a long time ago.”

Michael just shrugs. “People like you are dying off all the time.”

When he walks away, he feels like he’s just been crowned prince of the goddamn universe. Then he replays the conversation, over and over, until what he’s actually done starts to sink in. As he keeps walking, he feels himself deteriorate, until he ends up frantic and stabbing the buzzer at their front door.

* * *

“I’m an awful person,” he sobs, having lost every last bit of self-control.

“Well, Michael,” Stan says, patting him between the shoulders, “no one here is exactly a fucking saint.”

Peggy’s been sitting there, arms folded close, watching him. “You’re not wrong. He’s threatened by new ideas. He’s always been threatened by you.”

“I still made a complete ass of myself.” The ice jingles in his glass, lightly. “I’m never working _anywhere_ in advertising again.”

She hesitates, unsure what he even wants to hear. “He’d give you your job back, if you really went and apologized.”

“I don’t want it back. I’m done.” Michael shakes his head, putting the glass down. They’re sitting there in the living room, although it’s different than he remembers it—a wall is torn down, or something, and even though it’s dark out the walls seem to reflect more light. He’s clutching a box of tissues in his lap, which he tears at the ends of unconsciously. “I’m finding a new gig, and then I’m leaving.”

“Leaving the city?” Stan asks.

“Yeah.”

The three of them sit there a moment, each avoiding looking the other in the eye. Michael realizes the finality of it all, and the door he’s opened.

“I could come with you,” Stan says, too quickly. “I mean. I _would_.”

He turns to Peggy, whose reaction he’s dreading. But she seems calm, considering. “I would, too.”

Michael scans both their faces, unconvinced. “You want to drop everything and move to California.”

“Part time. Or full time.” She knows she’s getting ahead of herself, and it’s hard for Michael to watch. “We’d have to figure it out, but—we can make it work.”

He laughs, despite himself. “You would really do that?”

“We’re both in a rut. None of us want to be here anymore.” Peggy looks between them to see if there’s any disagreement; Stan just nods his head, looking like he doesn’t really believe this is going on. “And you don’t know how to _drive_. How are you getting anywhere?”

“I was going to learn how,” he says, quietly. “But—I mean, what about your kid?”

He freezes. Maybe that wasn’t supposed to be public knowledge. But Stan looks away like he knows what he’s talking about.

“I don’t want to take him back to this place,” Peggy says. “Can’t he come home and see a house? With sunlight, and room to sit down? I have to make some kind of positive impression.”

“Of course that’s your reason why.”

Calm as ever, Stan chimes in. “It sounds insane, but it’s not, really. We’ve talked about it for a long time. Just that—you’re someone we want to spend, you know, our lives with. For as long as possible.”

He’s just finished crying in front of both of them—certainly he’d had his share of jarring experiences for the day. But nothing’s quite felt like when his veins nearly turned to ice in that moment, before the blood started pumping again and he could remember how to speak.

“So do I.” He smiles, looking down at the carpet. “I'd like to, too.”

“Come here.”

Michael pulls himself onto the couch between them, and their arms fall around him easily, his head pillowed on her chest, Stan's chin in his shoulder. Even in the awkwardness of that first embrace, none of them could hide their relief and excitement, and they were happy like that for many years to follow.

* * *

They close up the office after midnight, and the two of them wander into the apartment upstairs with no lights on. Don gets a soda from the fridge. There’s a calendar on the wall, everything annotated by quarter with magic marker, and Roger stands by it, moonlight reflecting on the laminated surface.

“First of June’s a pretty big day. How old are you?”

Don scowls at him. “I don’t know.”

“Stop it. Everyone says they don’t know, but they do.”

“Fifty-three.”

“Congratulations.”

“I stopped drinking three years ago,” he says. He slides down from where he’s seated on the end of the bed to the floor. “This is all I have to show for it.”

“Hey.” Roger steps toward him. “You’re—”

“I know, I know. ‘You are okay,’” he sighs. “That doesn’t _mean_ anything.”

“I was just going to say you’re not a bad person. You might feel like you are, but you aren’t. There are things that are just out of our control.” Roger’s voice is unusually steady, calm. “That’s what that prayer is about, right?”

“Kind of.” Don inhales, then rattles off the words fluently. “‘God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference _._ ’”

“And the second half is about coming to Jesus.”

He smirks. “Correct.”

Roger sits down on the bed, unknotting his tie. Don’s head falls back and rests against his knee. When he looks down, he says: “At least we always end up in the same place, right?”

“I’ll drink to that.” He pushes the tab on the can of Coke, the metal cracking open.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey I finished it! thanks for reading, at whatever stage you found this in. also, thanks mad men for making me care about "small" storytelling and getting me absurdly invested in these characters. fuck you matthew weiner you creep


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